[tweetmeme]Today I’m very excited to announce the launch of the PhotoGuides Forum. It’s an addition that I’m hoping will revolutionise PhotoGuides, but we need your help to make it work!

For the past two years PhotoGuides has been well renowned as a website for photography and photoshop tutorials. We’ve shared content with over a million people in 200 different countries and received much love in return.

Today though PhotoGuides is transforming from a simple website into an online community, where photographers and designers can meet each other, share feedback, ideas, ask questions and simply discuss their passions.

Launching a forum is tricky. People really need to kick start the action and get the content rolling. I’m very pleased to say though that if you are a PhotoGuides Member your forum account is already live and running.

To make this forum work though, we really need your help. All that we ask is that you get involved, start great threads, ask great questions, share cool stuff and leave great comments. We need your help to get the discussions rolling!

As an added incentive there’s a competition running alongside the launch where you can win a Kodak mini camcorder or some PhotoGuides Books. Check the competition out over here.

That’s all for now though. I really hope you like the forum and I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can either comment below or jump over to the Forum Suggestions thread to leave feedback or new ideas for the forum. Thanks guys and enjoy!

Enough talk, take me to the forum! >

[tweetmeme]Yep, thanks for noticing. As you can probably see, PhotoGuides has been completely redesigned from the ground up. Whilst the colours and iconic style of PhotoGuides has remained fairly close to the original, the whole structure is evidently different. Here’s why we’ve redesigned.

The main focus for this redesign was to allow PhotoGuides to develop and become a strong contender in the world of online tutorials. Whilst the old website looked pretty nice, I felt it lacked usability. Content struggled to flow and it was impossible to support more than four categories. This was a huge burden to the concept of development, because it simply meant the website couldn’t expand, and even if it did there would be no way of sharing the great new content.

When I was asking for feedback on the old website design, most of it was positive. People liked the simple, elegant style of PhotoGuides. They liked how all the focus was on the tutorials and thought that the featured posts slider was pretty cool. It was clear that everyone liked the style and appearance of PhotoGuides.

Thanks to this feedback, I felt it was important to keep the website looking the same way. It’s still simple, it’s still elegant, the featured post slider is still pretty cool and thanks to the clear structure of the design, all of the focus is still on the guides and tutorials. The biggest change however comes when you scroll below the featured slider. Now every new post is displayed chronologically so you can scroll away and click anything that catches your eye. The structured sidebar also allows me to feature cool new stuff like posts and members content, and the categories bar just below the title also allows every section of PhotoGuides to easily be discovered and explored. All of these little things help to make the site so much more usable, and open doors for expansion in the future.

I’ve got a few ideas of where I want the website to head in the future, a few ideas of sections i’d like to open up, guides and tutorials to write and podcasts to release. This new design has opened up doors for expansion and is the key to achieving my goals for PhotoGuides. Thanks again to everyone who offered their feedback.

But what do you think of the new design? All feedback is welcome via the comments or by contacting me. Even if you’re new to PhotoGuides, what do you think of the new design, not just based on appearances, but on usability as well?

I’ve just made a facebook group for Photo Guides.
Join this and you’ll receive a post on your news feed every time I write a new guide or put up a new blog post.
You can also share your own photos, links and videos with everyone.

Take a look here at the Photo Guides Facebook Group

The Simunye Photography Collection

If you’re a regular on Photo Guides you may have noticed a lack of activity over the past 20 days or so. This is because I’ve been in South Africa on a trip called Simunye (meaning ‘We Are One’).

The Simunye Project is a non-profit organization which aims to empower young australians with the skills and attitude needed to make a global difference. Throughout my experience I, along with the rest of the team, helped to provide resources to a primary school, orphanage and after school program which included building a playground and a creche, as well as spending time playing with the children.

This experience is one I’ll never forget for many reasons, but the one most of you are interested in is the photography. I’ve tried to capture the emotion and happiness of the children as we interacted and played with them, and some of the photos powerfully convey this. The trip also included game drives and many sight seeing opportunities so my Simunye Collection holds many unique scenic views of South Africa with a focus on the incredible animals.

So take a look at my Simunye Collection