After seven months of nights and weekends, coding and re-coding, Photoshopping and re-Photoshopping, my new Web site is ready to launch. It represents where I’m hoping to go in 2010 and I hope you will get a chance to explore it.

The core goal of what I’m doing has less to do with the shiny Amazon integration or transparent PNG images.

Here’s what I’m trying to do: Build a delightful, intuitive atmosphere with supporting processes to help me generate prolific, relevant and creative content for each of my major interest groups: photography, books, projects and life experiences.

The site also now has a tagline: The online home of an aspiring polymath. It’s not that I’m trying to market myself—it’s that I want first-time visitors to have a clue as to what Lyza.com is.

Photography

One of the comments I heard most often from my readers was that it was difficult to find my photography online. I always assumed it was obvious that my photos could always be found on Flickr—but you know what they say about assumption. I sometimes half-heartedly embedded photography in posts, but this was both cumbersome and inelegant, resulting in inconsistency and my own frustration. Finally, I found that I was receiving a lot of communication through Flickr itself from people who had found my work but had no idea how to get a hold of me. To rectify each of these issues, the new site:

• Has a full photography section. The photography page of my site brings together photography-related posts, and also sports a big photo gallery viewer I built myself. I can easily switch in highlighted groups of photos and keep readers abreast of what’s going on in my photographic world.
• Has a photo-blog-esque new category of individual photograph posts. By creating a simple underlying process, I can drop in featured photos easily for my readers to see.
• Provides background on my photographic style, history and usage/licensing information, which links to my contact page. Yeah, so my last site didn’t have a contact page.

Books & Learning

I discovered over the past months that there are actually some human beings out there that are interested in my book reviews and thoughts on books.

On my previous site, generating and posting a book review was a cumbersome, unwieldy shenanigan that resulted in inconsistent and infrequent postings. There was also no simple way for readers to get a snapshot of books I’d recommended. In person, people often ask me: “You read [a lot/too much/a book occasionally]—what should I read next?”

The new site addresses some of these shortcomings:

• There is now a more cohesive Books & Reading section of the site.
• Book reviews are more cleanly separated from other book- or learning-related content.
• Book reviews have a whole heckuva lot more consistency: star ratings, tagging, and integrated Amazon covers and links.
• A feature on the Books & Learning page provides some recommendations of books I liked, both in fiction and non-fiction genres.
• I hope I have left some room for conceptual expansion here: The “Learning” terminology is something I want to build on—that is, this section might not remain strictly about books forever. I might bring in more topics about learning.

Projects & Adventure

The Projects section of the new site is perhaps the least defined at this point. At Pencilhaven, David and I are always up to something odd and new, and our travels have recently become more broad. The Projects section aims to start catching some of these things and give them a home.

Community

I want to hear more of what my readers have to say. I want to give you more to talk about. I am also going to experiment with highlighting the ideas and writings of my friends and family members who might not want to take the trouble to maintain a blog, but who have pretty interesting things to say. Keep your eyes open for that.

More Information

For those of you of the geekly inclination who want to know about the technical details of the site, I’ve created a page describing some of the tech highlights.

Thank you for Reading

Finally, thanks for paying attention. I know many of you may only visit the new site once, and then return to getting updates via RSS—and that’s fine! I appreciate the support and friendship you’ve shown me by being loyal readers in the past and hope that the new site will be more entertaining and neat for you!

One of the most thrilling things I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances over the past few months (when my focus has been on developing this site and its content—my old site languished a bit) was “When are you going to start posting again?” This makes me indescribably happy.