Delegation Sensation

I just read John Loomis' post here about delegating. For pretty much my entire life I've been stubborn and insisted on doing things myself. Even yesterday I spent a good hour trying to fix a plumbing problem. I realized a Leatherman isn't made to fix everything. I called a pro. Problem fixed, and actually not that expensive.

With optimism, vigor, and a lot of coffee, I too, have been cranking away at Lynda.com. I've learned and re-learned many of the valuable applications necessary to running a photography business.

Then there's the website.

I've been designing and coding my own site ever since I was in college and took an HTML seminar at the Texas libary. I've even managed to make a small profit developing the sites of other photographers and designers.

Enough is enough.

As much as I enjoy working in Flash, and I do, the time finally came yesterday to hand the scripting, coding, and backend development reigns over to a professional.

We all want to maintain high standards, doing things the right way and the best we can. I know I could totally fake it on the backend and my site would look the same to anyone viewing it. However, to really make it a professional site, I would have to eventually work with all of these crazy acronyms: PHP, MySQL, CSS, XML, etc.

Not my job. I'm a photographer. I've used my site to promote that and not the other way around. Don't get me wrong, ever since I was first exposed to HTML, I've continually learned just enough to be dangerous. Which is to say enough to do what I wanted, but not enough to really know what I was doing. Certainly not enough to do it efficiently.

Last year I finally hired an accountant (not that I really needed one until last year), but only now do I feel strangely liberated. I'm free to work on other Flash projects, including my own site, but for once I won't be burdened with tediously recreating and redesigning the site every time I want to update it. And I can focus exclusively on my passion for making and taking pictures.

As my business has grown a lot over the last year, I've learned many valuable lessons. Not least of which is to have a budget and not loose sleep when you pay a lot of money for something (equipment, marketing) that you've determined you really need.

So, the new site will be done by the end of March. At least that's what my new Webmaster tells me. There will be a lot of new work, and my logo may look a bit different. I'm excited, and I don't have to sear my retinas determing a proper tween rate for a movie clip.

I am no longer the webmaster of my domain.