As you might have already noticed, our website has been significantly changed during the last two weeks. Just like I promised in my earlier post, the site has been completely reorganized and now only hosts photography-related content. All of Lola’s wedding and recipe content has been moved to Lola’s own website lola-elise.com and related content from this site has been redirected there.

The top navigation menu now includes Reviews with sub-menus to Lens Reviews and Camera Reviews, Photography Tips with sub-menus to Photography Tips for Beginners, Post-Processing Tips for Beginners and Flash Photography Tips, and the new Gear Guide. I have not yet had a chance to finish working on all new pages, but new and updated content will be added to the these pages very soon. The Gear Guide will be a new section with my recommendations for various photography needs and will have short reviews of photography equipment such as lenses, cameras, accessories, software, etc. I will be working on the Gear Guide during the next few weeks.

All categories on the sidebar have also been modified. I removed the previous categories that showed our photography work (and other personal stuff) and replaced them with new categories that primarily host photography articles and reviews. A new section called “current deals and rebates” has been added to the sidebar – I will post links to special deals and discounts there. The slider on the top of the page now features our articles and reviews, instead of Lola’s weddings. Other content is being added to the site, for the two mini-projects I am planning on launching within the next month or two.

As for Lola’s new site, it has a different design and layout than Mansurovs.com, allowing for larger photographs to showcase her work. Lola will be posting images from her photo shoots on lola-elise.com and will be cross-posting some of them here with tips on how she took photographs and then post-processed them in Ligthroom or Photoshop.

Here is a screenshot of her new website Lola-Elise.com:

I hope you like the new changes. Please let us know how you like these changes and please drop a comment about what you think of Lola’s new blog! Lola is still working on lola-elise.com and will be making a separate announcement on her blog very soon. I know she can’t wait to hear 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!

Lola and I have been putting a lot of thought into optimizing the browsing experience of our website and with some feedback from our customers and friends, we concluded that we have to make a few major changes. When I purchased the “mansurovs.com” domain five years ago, I had no intentions of writing photography-related articles or gear reviews. As I started doing the latter, our website popularity went off the roof in several years and we now have a big group of loyal readers that we are very thankful to have.

Our problem today has to do with the way the site is organized, or to put it correctly “disorganized”. The main page is where we post photography tips and reviews, while Lola has her two sub-sites “Recipes” and “Weddings” – all under our “mansurovs.com” main domain (I removed the “Technology” section because I have no time to maintain it). This is presenting multiple problems:

1. The site is hard to navigate
2. Sub-sections are not relevant to each other and the main site
3. The fact that weddings are located in a sub-section is not good for Lola’s marketing efforts
4. Hard to manage our subscriptions, feeds, etc

So, instead of putting all kinds of irrelevant stuff into one big site, Lola and I have been thinking about separating photography articles and reviews from the website to a separate domain. I happen to own a domain called “nikon-photography.com” (nothing there yet), which I purchased a while ago. What if we were to move all photography-related stuff there? That way, we keep “mansurovs.com” for the business side of things (that’s where Lola and I would keep our portfolio and a separate blog for current and future clients) and all photography-related work + reviews would be permanently moved to “nikon-photography.com”.

Why Nikon-Photography.com? Because I love Nikon and want to continue writing reviews and articles related to Nikon, plus our website is all about photography. Does this mean I won’t be publishing Canon/Sony/Sigma, etc reviews? No, in fact I do want to expand to other brands in the future. I just could not find any other domains that were good and relatively short. Perhaps the domain should not have any brand name in it… I looked at many other domain combinations to no avail. If you have a good suggestion for a domain name, please let me know! If you make a suggestion, please first find out if the domain is available…you can look up available domains via Godaddy.com.

Now this obviously means we would be making some massive changes to the site and people would have to be redirected to the new domain, which also means that we would take a huge hit as far as search engine rankings are concerned. But at the same time, I want to make this right once, so that I do not have to do it again in the future.

What do you guys think? Do you think this would be a good move? Do you want to visit our site and only see photography-relevant content there? Now this does not mean you won’t be seeing Lola’s or my pictures – we will still be posting them. But posting them with information and tips on how we took them. We will not be just posting images to showcase our work.

Please let us know what you think – your opinion is invaluable to us.

P.S. Don’t forget to vote below!

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Lola has been using our new logo as a watermark during the last couple of weeks in her wedding blog, sort of testing it while we were finalizing the layout, colors, fonts, etc. Now that we have finalized everything, I would love to get some feedback from our dear readers on what you think about our logo. Here are some of the renderings of our logo in different colors:

Lola and I have been trying to get a good logo for our business for sometime now. We worked with multiple graphic designers and artists and did not like any of their concepts. Then, one day, Lola sees one of my Facebook contacts (our fan) and checks out his work. She was immediately impressed by some of his work and asked me to contact him. He responded to my request immediately and sent several different concepts for us to see. We really liked most of the concept work and had a hard time picking our favorites. We ended up picking the above renderings, in addition to the below “Mansurovs” text:

So, what does the logo signify and why did we like this particular rendering? First, “Lola” translates as Tulip (the flower) in Uzbek and Turkish, so Lola’s name is not the same as the Spanish names “Dolores” or “Lolita”. Because of her name’s flowery nature, the idea was two folded – to have an image of a Tulip and the letter “M” – the first letter of “Mansurovs”, as shown above.

The young artist’s name who created the above for us is Rustam Babadjanov and while he lives in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, coordination and communication was not a problem at all. He is currently finishing up business cards for us as well, which I will post for you to see as soon as they are ready. He does not have a web page or a fan page yet, but as soon as he does, I will post his contact information.

Let us know what you think!

The last couple of months have been crazy and I have been traveling a lot, which is the reason why I have not been able to add fresh content to the site more often. The last two weeks, in particular, were exhausting and I am finally home – that’s after 6,000 miles of driving across the Western USA. Started out in Yellowstone, then went north to Glacier, then visited both Olympic and Mount Rainier in Washington, then ended up in Yosemite and Mono Lake. The purpose of the trip was to photograph landscapes and wildlife, while having a relaxing time with the nature – so it was more of a vacation than a photo shoot. I scouted for new locations and spots, and took the time to explore new places that I have never visited before, so it was a great learning experience. I had the Nikon D5100 with me all along, so another camera review will be posted soon, hopefully by the end of this week. A comprehensive 50mm test with lots of comparisons is also coming up.

Aside from loss of some photographs (more on that on the next post), the trip was great. During the next few weeks I will be working on the images from this and other trips earlier this year and post some images, along with some tips, as usual. Here is one of the images from the trip:

Click the above image to see a larger version of the image.

I have received a number emails from our visitors about some blog issues such as Lola’s Wedding Blog slider not working properly on Google Chrome browser and blog not being displayed correctly on Apple mobile devices (iPhone & iPad). Just wanted to let you guys know that all issues have been taken care of – the slider has been changed and enhanced to work with any browser, styling issues have been fixed and the blog is now displayed properly on all mobile devices. Big thanks to everyone who contributed in getting these issues addressed, we truly appreciate it!

By the way, if you do use Google Chrome, you should know that it is not color-managed. This means that the colors on photographs you view on the Internet will be way off. If my images appear over-saturated, you are probably using a non color-managed browser. It is a shame that Google is holding up on this important feature – Firefox, IE and Safari fully support color management.