A new beginning for OCPix website

Well, I finally decided to make a few changes to OCPix. Actually its many changes. Most are not that noticeable, but some will be soon enough. Prior to today, my main photography site OCPix.com was hosted by smugmug.com, which is a great company and great way to present, store and deliver photos to my clients.

However, the site itself has many issues when it came to “discoverability” by the search engines, especially google search. Even though I had many very unique photos ranging from surfing to portraits of well known individuals and events, google would simply not index them. After days, weeks and months of trying to figure out why, I finally discovered that it was due to Smugmug’s unique way of cataloging my images where the URLs it created were viewed as “duplicates” by google and thus would not index the images.

I did a several tests and realized the galleries I created and and spent lots of time creating, for example the 2019 US Open of Surfing gallery, were no longer indexed by google. Thus the rest of my galleries fell to the same fate.

So, what to do?

Well, I still love the way Smugmug presents my photos on the galleries, so I decided to move the domain OCPix.com to my own custom site, here where I can control where I link to (my galleries on Smugmug) and also add a blog since I often like to discuss how I captured or created some of these images.

For now, my galleries will remain on Smugmug, in its original setup, which I will link to from this new OCPX.com site. More to come as I develop it a little more.