A Big Thanks for Your Feedback!

It has been over a week since I requested our readers to help us out in deciding the future our site. To be honest, I was surprised to see so many of our readers respond to my request. We received close to 60 comments and over a hundred emails with all kinds of suggestions and recommendations. In addition, we had approximately 400 people vote in our poll, so we got plenty of feedback overall. And I am not even counting our friends and Facebook fans that also shared their opinions on this important matter.

Before I talk about the website, I would like to thank everyone who responded to my request. I was planning to reply to every one of your comments and emails, but I would have to spend at least several days just doing that, so I hope you will forgive me :) From the bottom of our hearts, we would like to say big “Thank You” to our readers that care about what we do. When somebody tells me that our site is the source of their inspiration, I always say the same thing in return – readers like you are the source of our inspiration. We get so many positive emails and comments on a daily basis from all over the world, that I cannot manage to respond to them anymore. Please do not get mad if you did not get a reply from me or Lola! We do try hard to help everyone out and we do our best to respond to all inquiries. Sometimes it takes days, weeks or even months to catch up with all the communication.

By now, you are probably wondering if we’ve made a decision or not. We have, and it is largely influenced by your feedback. My original plan was to move all photography-related articles and reviews to a different domain like nikon-photography.com and keep mansurovs.com as our “business site”. Interestingly, most votes (47%) supported this idea, while votes for keeping the site the way it is, or moving it to a different domain were split almost even. Those who left comments and wrote emails, however, largely disagreed with my idea and suggested to keep the name “mansurovs” in the domain, because that’s how people recognize us (branding) and changing it would be a mistake. Many of you agreed that keeping the wedding, recipes and other non-photography content in a different location is a good idea and both Lola and I support that – keeping everything the way it is is very confusing in terms of navigation. I thought of perhaps changing the site layout, but there is no easy way to integrate that content with our photography articles and reviews.

After reading through all comments and emails, I realized that my idea to use nikon-photography.com was not only limiting our work to a single brand, but also making it sound more like yet another commercial “photo tips” site – definitely NOT something I want to do. At this point I have no plans to commercialize our site and I certainly do not want to clutter it with advertisements and all sorts of links to external websites. We do get inquiries from advertising agencies and photography stores, but I have been declining their offers. Again, I want to keep the site clean. Both Lola and I enjoy sharing our knowledge and posting articles and reviews, and we both do it in our free time, which is why the site does not get updated very often (which hopefully will change soon).

Without further ado, let me go over the current plan:

1. We will continue to use mansurovs.com for photography tips, articles and reviews.
2. All irrelevant or less relevant content will be moved out to a separate domain, including Lola’s Recipes and Weddings sections.
3. We have not decided on a new domain for Lola’s, but it will not be “mansurovs-photography.com”. Why? Because marketing wedding services under “Mansurovs” in the US turned out to be difficult and people have a hard time remembering or pronouncing it. We want to use something simpler, perhaps with Lola’s name in the domain.
4. This does not mean that Lola will not be posting her images anymore. In fact, she will be cross-posting some of the images from her new site, with information on HOW she took images and what techniques she used. That way, you won’t be seeing just pictures, but also useful information on how they were taken.
5. All moved content links will be redirected to the new site.
6. The design of mansurovs.com will stay the same, but the top and side navigation layouts will change.
7. Lola’s site will have a big portfolio page with pictures, along with a wedding blog. Recipes will probably go into a smaller section inside her blog.
8. “Lola’s wedding blog” images on the front page of mansurovs.com will change to “featured” photography articles/reviews.

Once again, thank you so much for your feedback! I will be making some heavy changes to the site within the next few weeks, so stay tuned!