#1435. DearSusan‘s new homes!

Notice the plural ;)

Our new nest

Why the reboot?

DS started as a wordpress.com website with limited functionality and very few readers. The arrival of Paul and Philippe in the team made this much more exciting and, since those days, over 40 other contributors have posted articles and photographs on the second version of DS. This is the version most readers know. It grew from humble beginnings to a website that saw 15 000 visits a day at its peak. If you believe in TOP 10s, note that DS was also rated #9 best photo blog in the world, so we were obviously doing something right ;)

The flip side of this is behind the scenes. 1500 posts and pages, 30 000 images, roughly as many comments, hidden features that require modules to work together … all of this requires a lot of time and, as the website grows, a lot of money. Roughly $20,000 over the years and thousands of hours of work. And that wasn’t enough because, recently, some incompatibilities between the core technical framework, important plugins (for email, for galleries …) and recent versions of WordPress itself. This was untenable and solving the problem would have required long and expensive development work.

Then, there’s the landscape we evolve in. Google is quite happy to link to spam or broken pages, but a blog with no clear editorial line sinks to the bottom of search results. And there are ethical reasons which I will not discuss here that make the change of homes important to me. Enough with the negatives, but you get the idea behind the need for a reboot.

It’s all about the ecosystem

DearSusan’s new Homes

This website is one of them. The other is a Substack newsletter.

This website is built on Squarespace. If you’ve ever watched a photo video on YouTube, I’m sure you’ve heard of them ;) It’s a lot less “industrialised” than the old website, but also more modern, prettier and provides a host of easy features for photographers (emailing, galleries, online shops …) Think of this new home as the storefront, where things get displayed and sold, readers can subscribe and support financially (the content will always be free, money can never be an obstacle for someone who wants to learn), and Google (and AI robots) find something with a coherent enough structure to feature in search results.

Letters to Susan is the other half of the equation, the other home, built on Substack. Think of that part as the messy discussion site where notes are posted on any topics, posts that do not fall in the clean Google SEO categories get published, and where I hope other readers will find us and join the brilliant community that DS has always had the privilege of attracting. I mean that. You guys, your posts, your comments, your kind messages, the books you sent to me, the prints I received through the post, the ideas I would never have had, and the sense that humans can get along wherever they are on are blue globe, that is the true reward for the hours and dollars put in.

I will try to monetise this website, so that it can be a more sustainable effort. But the real prize is the community.

A focus on exploration

Exploring is that central focus which will structure DS going forward.

Adventure is a personal gratification thing. Seek a limit, go beyond, find thrill. Exploration benefits others. Find a topic, find new stuff, tell others. Everyone grows. Exploring new places, new techniques, new ideas, new (old) gear, new inspirations … That’s the topic for this specific website. It is consistent with what I personally tried to do with the previous one and it is ideal to support a community. Posts that explore something photography-oriented go here.

Others go on Substack. That doesn’t make them inferior. I just don’t want to refuse someone’s submission just because it doesn’t fit within Google’s narrow worldview. And, in fact, when my own posts are thought pieces, I’ll post them in episodes on Substack, wait for comments, counter ideas, suggestions … and when something more definitive coalesces, the final version will go to this website. See here, for example: The end of “film” cameras.

Flowers for us all

That’s it for the main ideas. For a while, the two websites (old DS and this) will live together as I transfer old posts that fit in with the new editorial line. I will try to download some of the others in PDF form to place them in an archive here. Then the old site will go away and this one will get the dearsusan.net address. If you have any ideas to help with this or reorient some ideas, please share in the comments :)

To a richer DS than ever! Be seeing you. Peace to you and yours!