If you’ve visited before, you probably noticed a new site design. I switched this blog over first because WordPress makes it so easy to implement big changes with little effort. But now I’ve changed my whole site over to the new design.

As has been the case for several years, my site is built in Lightroom using plug-ins by The Turning Gate. This new site design was created with their latest version of the plug-ins, CE4.

I’ve been using these plug-ins for several years and am very familiar with them, so setting up a new design was relatively painless. In fact, I probably use these plug-ins daily. I’m a moderator on the TTG user’s forum so I’m always exploring the plug-ins to answer people’s questions and help solve their problems. I’m a problem solver. That’s how I roll.

The major hurdle for me was simply coming up with a design. I wanted to get away from the old, nearly black background of my old site while keeping some of the same color scheme. I opted to keep the orange from a brilliant, foggy sunrise at Mt. Rainier’s Reflection Lake as a key color for the site. My old site also used a green for borders and other highlights so I’m still using a green for my hyperlink hover color. Other than those two nods to continuity, it’s pretty much all brand new. I think it’s more visually appealing and the font is more readable on a white background than on a black one.

Still, despite my intimacy with the plug-ins, the redesign wasn’t without its bumps. One super time saver when designing is that I can design in one plug-in and by way of user templates, copy the settings from that plug-in to another. So I completely designed (or so I thought) everything in one plug-in and copied the settings to the others. Only to discover little things here and there that I forgot. Oh well. Still, it didn’t take too long.

The bones of the site was created with TTG CE4 Pages. It creates several standard pages including a Galleries index, Contact page, About page and more. Beyond Pages I also use the Autoindex plug-in to create additional indexes and the Galleries plug-in to create my image galleries. These plug-ins also create templates to use with Lightroom’s Publishing service.

Any extra pages I have, like my individual Lessons pages, are created with TTG CE4 Stage. It’s really the Swiss Army knife of TTG plug-ins. With it I can create product pages for my books, video pages for YouTube, Vimeo, or HTML5 videos. It also creates before/after pages, which you can see in action on my lessons pages. That just scratches the surface.

If you’re curious about what the TTG plug-ins can do, head over to my TTG Tips site for a complete rundown.

And of course, this blog was designed using TTG’s Theme for WordPress plug-in. And I’m in the process of converting all my articles that I host on this site into blog posts. Right now, many of them are legacy articles left over from my old, old, old site and they look pretty pathetic. Converting them to blog posts also gives me the chance to update or even just trash some of them.

Another advantage of converting articles to blog posts is that I can categorize and tag the posts and use those categories and tags on a new Articles page I’m creating. This new WordPress based page will be able to display links to articles based upon the category and tag I’ve applied. So if I add a new post with the category “Lightroom Articles”, it will be automatically listed in that section of the Articles page. Very cool.

I know I’ve said this over and over again. But if you want a professionally coded, professional looking website to showcase your photography, and you want to manage it all from Lightroom, in my opinion, there’s no better way than to use the The Turning Gate’s plugins. I don’t get paid to say that. I just really believe it.

And if you do decide to use these plug-ins, I just happen to know someone who’s one of the world’s top authorities on using the plug-ins. He might even be willing help you out.