theblackmoor.net - Walter's Blog

Walter's Blog

This is where I might say anything and everything. Or not much at all, as I tend to do sometimes..

Business is better than expected!

By khaytsus - 4/11/2009 Google Ads have seemed to help out quite a bit, we're getting frequent calls at Unlimited Photo these days.

Expansion of my photography business..

By khaytsus - 11/2/2007 Well, I started out fairly strong I think.. New to the business and then had 6 weddings in just a few years. But it's been a few years, partly because we didn't want to leave Emma by herself, but now that she's over 2 years old and is perfectly content to stay with my mom there's just no excuses left! I enjoy photography and I really enjoy working with the folks at weddings. Everyone is so energized.. Some of it is misfocused, but rarely negative. I heard many bad things about doing wedding photography and so far not a single one of the things I heard has happened. I don't want to invite Murphy along for the ride so I won't specifically mention anything, but needless to say I've been very pleased with the way things have gone. So I recently rebuilt my website. It's currently still quite the same content that the old site was, but it's using a new web application called CMS Made Simple and it is quite easy to use, but also extremely easy to customize. No editing templates and CSS in an external environment and refreshing to see how things are, it's all within the CMS in a safe Admin page which allows you to modify without worries of locking yourself out of the site and lets you preview, etc.. And if you mess up, many times there's a 'Restore Defaults' button. Back on topic.... So I've got a new site, very customizable, I'm reworking the content, I've updated my packages based on feedback over the years on what my customers want, expanded on some information. Not really offering anything new per say, but just explaining it better and giving more in the service. The site could be prettier, but I'm no CSS ninja. Hopefully I can improve that aspect, but for now I'll make it as functional as I need it to be. I've also started using AdSense from Google to drive more traffic to the website. My budget is set low right now so the increase will be low, but I'm going to get a feeling on how well it works before I invest more. However, advertisement is one of those expenses that you can't afford to not invest in if you want to expand your business. So I plan on expanding more, I just need to do it slowly. We don't have the revenue to justify a sudden expansion of expenses, and I plan on purchasing a new camera in the spring if all goes well. So I need to save my pennies.

Not much to say I guess...

By khaytsus - 7/10/2007 I've never been much of a blogger.. I'll chat on Opennap and IRC (EFnet and Freenode), even on several forums that I frequent, but I never manage to find any time to blog. Not like I think anyone cares to hear what I have to say, but I should at least give some updates here and there. The website was sort of "down" from 6/29/7 until 7/6/7 from what I estimate. Seems a bug with registering users was holding up or crashing the display of the website, so the pages, navigation, etc were blank. Suddenly after about 7 days it all came back to normal. I reported it on the WebGUI forum, what else can I do. Emma is growing like crazy, body and mind. She climbs anything in her path now, picks up about anything we say to her, knows about half of her ABC flash cards (52 total cards, 2 of each letter), and is constantly saying stuff we don't expect. Some examples would be "I want cookie" (while making her breakfast, btw..) or various things such as "It's my baby" or "oooh, my baby" in reference to her various dolls. She has one in particular she likes, but she seems to need to have a number of them on hand. And after 14 months, she still has to have her monkey to sleep with. I have a cute picture of perhaps the first time she slept by herself in bed with monkey snuggled up to her, but I'll have to find it. I only have about 1100 pictures of her. Actually I really need to take more, I don't take them as often as I should and I feel I'm missing quite a lot. I won't even get into the fact that I never, ever use my video camera...

Migrated my initial page, mostly..

By khaytsus - 12/4/2006 I've migrated the text and links into appropriate areas of this new website, although a lot of the links are to the old material. I'll need to migrate more of that data in sometime.

Updating theblackmoor.net

By Admin - 12/3/2006 It's been damn long enough, my current website has been the same for about 6 or 7 years now. It's about time to update it. I've been planning on using a CMS for several years now for it, as I already have on unlimitedphoto.com and khayts.us but I go back and forth between theblackmoor.net being a portal and being a full website of its own. I'm still not sure to be honest, but I'm going to migrate the data that's currently on the site here and then figure out where to go from there. The CMS I chose was WebGUI, and while it's rather complicated I think I am liking it so far. Had a little trouble getting it up and running correctly but it seems okay now. Here's hoping it stays that way, and that I actually follow through with the website. Something I tend to slack on!