Define Goals

[danielgroves]

Content is king, and all that. Before starting to work out how to lay things out properly, or how it should look, I really need to figure out exactly what it is I want to achieve with this effort.

Photography

The primary goal is orientated towards my work as a landscape, adventure and travel photographer.

1. Make people more aware of my work
2. To show-case my work, both as final-portfolio pieces and as a whole
3. To support future extension of the showcase of work. In-mind examples for the future include searchable metadata and print sales.

Writing

I'm writing more long-form pieces which are made up of multiple pieces. I'm telling more stories which are both word and photography heavy. I really want too focus on seeing these lands fast, and display beautifully. If someone see's an image they should be able to buy it easily if it's for sale.

1. Beautifully crafted content display
2. Fast. Users should not be waiting on content to download, or similar. I've already gone a long way towards achieving this.
3. Engagement. I want to keep people on the site, and entice them into seeing another piece of content.
4. Easy to navigate. This may involve merging all content under a single heading, and making that easy to filter down on.

Focus

Photography, not development.

1. To make it easy to find technical or non-technical content.
2. To put the photography first going into the future.

I will consider moving development content out into a different website.

Branding

1. To make people remember who I am. I want them to come back, after all.
2. To increase engagement with both content and social media accounts.

[nickcharlton]

Something I've struggled with before when reviewing posts is finding where it is. What do you think about the existing set of "high level" categories?

[danielgroves]

@nickcharlton Yep, this is something I've been considering. I had loosely formed the idea of having 'Notebook', and then 4-5 main categories below that (adventure, photography, fear, etc) and allowing filtering within each by tag.

I'm also wondering about extending the 'series' functionality further, but possibly more in the long run once I've got everything into a dynamic environment to give myself some more flexibility (thinking long-term Ansel switch here).

I've also been wondering about breaking the 'development' section out into a different site entirely so my main site can become more focused. I reserved danielgroves.github.io some time ago with this thought. What's your opinion on that?

[nickcharlton]

Categories sounds like a good approach to this. It'll keep everything together, but clearly delineate things.

I'd run with the series thing. It works well for a lot of what you write. It ends up similar to Digital Ocean's Series (e.g.: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial_series/getting-started-with-freebsd).

I'd avoid splitting the site. You'll end up with two projects to maintain, not own that domain yourself and split traffic between your interests.

[danielgroves]

Cool, thanks @nickcharlton 👍

Incidentally, added the start of a series thing over the summer already: https://danielgroves.net/notebook/2016/04/eurovelo#series-information