The past few months I have been spending time re-organizing the Colorado and Texas wildflower websites. I wanted to make them better in terms of accuracy, photo quality and usability.
The work involved several items:
- Double and triple-checking the names of the species. A lot of errors cropped up, found mostly by some very nice viewers who politely let me know that I made some stupid mistakes.
- Adding plant descriptions when available, extracted from a variety of sources.
- Resizing all of the photos to a standard size to optimize viewing. I chose 1440w x 960h (pixels) for landscape and 960 w x 1440h for portrait orientations.
- Culling some and re-developing the remaining photos, including running through NIK Color Efex Pro and sometimes NIK Define 2 for noise reduction.
- Adding watermarks. Maybe they’ll do some good. It would be flattering, I suppose, if someone stole some pix and made postcards out of them. Hasn’t happened that I know of.
- Adding information about how the photos were taken on the Colorado wildflowers site; I plan to add this info to the Texas site, too.
- And finally, adding a search function to both sites. I am using Google’s Custom Search Engine. Give it a try.
As a result of the point 1 and 4 above, I have a big list of flowers to re-shoot this spring in Texas and Colorado in the summer.
The next job is to do much the same with the scenery websites, but I’ll leave that effort for the next spell of bad weather.
