Dynamic Depth Photo: The September–October 2026 Website Rebuild and Expansion
Development history through October 6, 2026
Over the past several weeks, I have been rebuilding Dynamic Depth Photo around the photographs and the things people can learn from them. That work has included the portfolio, Gettysburg history, photography lessons, interactive tools, navigation, memberships, and the details that make a website easier to use on a phone.
Some changes are already available. Others have been researched, built, or tested but still need installation or further checking. This first development journal brings those stages together without treating a plan as a finished feature.
September 18: Protecting the original site while rebuilding
The major rebuild began with Dynamic Depth Photo as the site identity and www.dynamicdepthphoto.com as the primary address. A private duplicate of the Squarespace site provided a place to develop the new presentation while protecting the public website.
The early work focused on a photography-first homepage, organizing the main portfolio categories, and preserving the existing collections. The design work saved in that private copy on September 18 was preparation; it did not replace the live site that day.
September 19: Building the Gettysburg research foundation
The Gettysburg work paired photographs with identification, historical context, citations, and mapped locations. At this checkpoint, the reviewed material included 88 approved captions or subject identities, 68 historical stories covering 86 photographs, and 49 distinct map pins representing 63 mapped photographs or monuments.
Those figures describe the research package at that stage. Installation and visitor testing remained ahead, and editor access problems interrupted that work. Keeping the research stage separate from publication mattered: a carefully prepared history still needs to appear correctly beside the right photograph.
September 23: Reviewing the whole visitor experience
A broader quality review examined the portfolio, Gettysburg material, navigation, memberships, donations, print purchasing concepts, voting and visitor-counting ideas, and the experience of opening photographs on desktop and mobile.
The review could read 19 of the 20 requested pages, including all 12 linked galleries. It did not give the website a full desktop and mobile sign-off. Visual rendering, lightboxes, mobile overflow, and interactive behavior still needed attention.
Some authenticated gallery previews returned errors while others opened. Those preview failures were recorded as problems to investigate; they were not treated as evidence that the photographs had disappeared.
September 24–27: Bringing the rebuilt site into public view
During this period, public checks documented the homepage, portfolio collections, community material, Gettysburg section, print information, licensing information, About page, and Contact page. Branding work also produced the Dynamic Depth Photo logo and related assets. Individual graphics and page revisions still required their own installation checks.
Navigation work connected Portfolio, Community, Learning Center, Prints, Licensing, About, Contact, and Search. A published mobile adjustment improved the way previous and next controls stacked. Follow-up checks still found inconsistent routes and links, so navigation remained part of the repair work.
The Fine Art Prints page provided a way to ask about a photograph, size, and print options and receive a quote. It was an inquiry workflow; automated ordering and fulfillment were not complete. The Image Licensing page similarly helped visitors explain the intended use of a photograph.
Learning material expanded alongside the portfolio. On September 27, “How to Read a Photograph” was announced for the Photography Learning Center. Its subject remains central to the current Reading a Photograph lesson: noticing what is actually visible, examining light and composition, and separating observation from assumptions about how an image was made. The Learning Center now presents that lesson with the wider photography curriculum.
The membership idea was also broadening during this period, moving beyond an early games-centered concept toward photography education, practice, and useful photographic experiences.
September 29–30: Reshaping memberships and preparing search improvements
Late-September work continued to reorganize the membership catalog and the relationship between memberships and individual tools. The direction documented by the October 2 handoff was Create at $10 per month, Gallery at $15 per month, and Studio at $20 per month, with earlier Discover/$5, VIP, and other legacy concepts retired. These were the intended offerings, not an announcement that paid enrollment had passed every test or opened for sale.
The records overlap as the catalog changed, so I am not assigning every retirement to September 29. The important shift was toward a coherent photography-learning program rather than carrying forward every earlier idea.
September 30 also produced a substantial search-engine optimization package: proposed titles and descriptions for main pages and community galleries, Gettysburg metadata work, image-description planning, and technical checks. That prepared package did not itself change the public site. Search improvement requires applying the changes, checking the results, and allowing search engines to revisit them.
Payment-provider readiness was recorded in the early-October handoff, but that did not establish that the complete customer experience was ready. Membership access, checkout, content delivery, and account behavior remained separate testing requirements.
October 1–2: Featured photographs, learning tools, and clearer release gates
Featured Photography brought together 30 selected photographs and gave visitors a shorter route into the wider portfolio. The homepage presentation connected that selection with the story behind my work. Hourly homepage photograph rotation was also part of the development, with panoramas excluded from the normal header rotation.
The learning and tool program expanded across exposure, histograms, focus, depth of field, composition, editing, field planning, print readiness, and portfolio selection. Work included tools such as the Camera Simulator, Exposure & Histogram Tutor, Focus & Sharpness Analyzer, Depth Map Studio, Print Readiness Lab, and photography journals and coaching concepts. Their presence in a development catalog did not mean every paid tool or access path was ready for customers.
The October 1–2 records make an important distinction: 17 native SEO metadata updates and three published page-content cleanups were complete, while 42 event-gallery SEO proposals and 144 asset-matched alternative-text proposals were still unapplied. Those prepared improvements were not counted as live changes.
Account and sign-in behavior, standalone purchase routes, search, mobile layouts, performance, and the Website Updates feature also needed attention. Photo Games was retired, while old links and search listings required additional cleanup. A retired page can disappear from the site before a search engine refreshes an older result.
Tester development covered 30-day access, Studio and standalone tool testing, passcode workflows, sign-up instructions, and days-remaining indicators. Some individual controls were tested, but automated email delivery and the full customer access lifecycle still required verification.
October 3: Putting consistency and reliability ahead of launch
The next phase emphasized a consistent header and footer, clearer navigation, accessibility, search, the Learning Center, and Gettysburg content. Desktop and mobile regression testing became part of the work rather than a final cosmetic check.
The launch sequence prioritized non-print functionality. Automated print ordering and client-gallery commerce remained deferred, while the existing print-inquiry route stayed available. Membership and standalone checkout still needed end-to-end verification before a wider release.
Retired Photo Games content was to remain retired. Repairing an old link did not mean restoring an offering that had already been removed from the site's direction.
October 3–4: Personal history, photography education, and visual refinement
Publication reports from this period documented the Remembering Dad memorial page, military photographs on the About page, gold accents around preview cards and gallery thumbnails, and the Pennsylvania Monument visual treatment. These additions gave the site more personal and historical context while keeping the photographs prominent.
The Photographer’s Lexicon and Exposure Triangle Lab also reached the published site. Their development continued with checks of definitions, controls, readability, and navigation. App and tester links were part of the wider integration work and still needed to be evaluated as complete visitor journeys.
Gettysburg improvements focused on Little Round Top, Devil’s Den, interactive battle-map lessons, historical explanations, mobile controls, and appropriate use of my own photographs. The direction was to help visitors understand the relationship between a place, a photograph, and the events associated with it. Prepared story expansions were kept separate from material already installed.
The Spotify portion of the Gettysburg experience was dropped, and YouTube was retained. Further historical and mobile checks remained important even where a particular visual change had been accepted.
October 4–5: Repairing sharing and working through editor failures
Social sharing became a major repair priority. Facebook sometimes showed an older homepage photograph, a generic gallery description, or the Dynamic Depth Photo logo instead of the selected image. Other attempts produced an incomplete preview.
The homepage sharing direction was a permanent branded preview image, independent of the hourly rotating homepage photograph. For individual photographs, the practical goal was a reliable link to the intended picture with a useful, recognizable preview.
On October 5, I confirmed a specific Facebook test: the posted link opened the intended photograph, and the Dynamic Depth Photo preview appeared in the post. That was a successful test of that link. It did not establish that every gallery and every sharing control had passed.
Intermittent editor and browser failures slowed installation and checking. The recorded problems included editor pages failing to load, server errors, unresponsive tabs, and shifting login fields. The repair queue also included duplicate product entries, navigation inconsistencies, a persistent update card, mobile controls, and extra space below the footer. Those were distinct issues; there was no verified single cause for all of them.
Troubleshooting gathered the observed errors, attempted fixes, results, and remaining tests for support review. A prepared repair could not be described as finished while it was still waiting for an editor session, a save, or a live check.
October 5: A controlled repair pass
The consolidated repair instructions called for preserving working areas, keeping rollback copies, making one controlled change at a time, and checking the published result on desktop and mobile. Substantial code repairs were to receive dedicated implementation and testing rather than being improvised in the live editor.
Recorded progress included removal of duplicated footer code, verified photograph-search work, gallery-description corrections, and focused repairs to educational content and update information. Other navigation, mobile, sharing, and membership checks remained open. Passing a focused test did not close unrelated work.
Downloadable versions of standalone photography tools were considered as a future option. That feasibility work was not the release of downloadable products.
October 6: An Updates journal and RSS publication channel
October 6 also brought two focused corrections: the date on the Remembering Dad page was corrected, and the fundraising goal amount was removed from the photography support page. The normal donation controls and business-related disclosures remained in place. The published changes were checked on the public site, with the memorial correction also reviewed in desktop and mobile previews.
The next addition is this dated Updates journal. It is intended to give visitors a clear record of meaningful changes and an RSS subscription route for readers such as Feedly.
A Feedly test had not found a discoverable feed from the existing website. The implementation therefore calls for a suitable Squarespace Blog collection, a working public Updates page, valid RSS output, and a successful reader test. Feed availability will be announced once those checks are complete.
Future entries will summarize substantial additions and repairs and link to the permanent pages. Related changes can be combined into one useful entry rather than turning every small adjustment into a separate announcement.
What you can explore, and what remains underway
You can browse the photography portfolio, visit the 30 selected photographs, explore Gettysburg histories alongside the Gettysburg photographs, and work through Photography Concepts and the Learning Center. Print and licensing inquiries are also available through their respective pages.
Work continues on mobile usability, navigation consistency, sharing, tool behavior, search visibility, and membership access. Automated print commerce remains a later phase. This journal will document the important changes as they become usable, with the same distinction between something that is planned, something that has been tested, and something visitors can actually use.