Andriy Zolotoiy Photography Blog

Happy holidays everyone! This year for Christmas I did some serious cooking, at least it was serious for me We decided to skip on turkey for main entree and go with more traditional Ukrainian dish called Chicken Kiev in North America. These are chicken cutlets named after my hometown Kiev, supposedly where recipe came from. I watched my mom and my wife making these many times but this time I was all alone on the this. The trick with this dish is that fairly large piece of butter is enclosed in tenderized chicken breast and then whole cutlet is deep fried, and if done properly melted butter should stay inside the cutlet when dish is served. To my amazement I screwed only the first cutlet I’ve made (and I had to eat it), the rest was nice and crunchy outside and juicy inside. Must be my luck as it’s considered one of the advanced level dishes to make. I snapped couple of shots of finished product here:

The outside is not perfect for food photography but they are completely cooked. Chicken Kiev are traditionally served with roasted or fried potatoes.

We also had cod liver stuffed eggs, another holiday dish from our home country.

While I’m preparing to launch my website updates I thought I’d share some information on two important topics of photographers’ websites.
These days web presence plays more important role than ever before. While the website creation can be done fairly easily the real problem is how other people would find your site among thousands of others. Here comes the term SEO. Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of internal and external modifications to the website so it can be easily discovered by search engines such as Google or Yahoo. SEO can get quite complicated but there are couple of things that can be done quite easily to improve your ranking in search engine world.
First, visit blogs that have relevant content to your own and leave comments (along with URL to your site). Search engines will pick these up as backlinks to your site. The more good backlinks are there the higher rating you will get.
But your own site has to have keywords and text that search engine robots can analyze. Here lies the problem with most of photographer websites – these sites are focused on images not text so robots see very little of useful information. And in addition most of these sites are not even designed to have much text in them. So my idea was to allocate small space on my site to bring exerpts from my blog onto front page of my portfolio site. The site will become dynamic and those robots should fall in love with it the same way the love blogs so much. This idea will not work with Flash based websites because they are not easily readable by robots.
For my own site I chose to use PHP/HTML combo for overall page layout and Flash for image galleries. I’m using free version of Autoviewer for the gallery which works really well but requires external file management. Recently I discovered that developer of Autoviewer released a new version of gallery management software svManager which is compatible with Autoviewer. For $35 you’re getting flexibility of those expensive web packages but you can customize nearly every aspect of image presentation. It take a bit of time to incorporate those generated galleries into own website design but it’s certainly not impossible task to do.

I’ve been working on my website updates in the last month. There are couple of goals that I set for myself. First, I certainly need file management on the site itself. I was uploading new images via Lightroom but the processes isn’t the fastest I’d like to see. Second, increasing SEO ratings is of most concern these days and I had some ideas how to gain more popularity to the website. Stay tuned for details on implementation of these topics.