Wow, another year gone already! As usual we like to take this time to reflect on what we have accomplished over the past year and give you an insight into what we hope to accomplish in the future. To start, we have prepared a few statistics showing the amount of content published during PhotoArk’s 2nd year; this includes 13 new articles, 2 of these were reviews, another 2 were photo walks and the remaining 9 were blogs. We also published our New York exhibition and are currently working on an exhibition of some of our images taken during a recent trip to Crete. As for the libraries, we have added dozens of new images with even more lined up waiting to be published.

The main focus of our 2nd year has been the PhotoArk V4.0 update which took us almost 9 months to complete. As we explained in our blog the main objective of this project was to update PhotoArk’s core framework so we can take advantage of the latest web standards and browser features. In addition to this it also gave us a chance to have a restructure, a classic example is our ‘Blog & Review Hub’ now named ‘Articles’. This is an area we have built on quite a lot during our second year adding amongst other things, the new ‘Photo Walks’ category. But doing this rendered our old banner inaccurate. With plans to open a knowledge base as well, we decided to ditch ‘Blog & Review Hub’ in favour of something more broad, hence ‘Articles’. By doing this we also managed to shorten our links making them a little more human friendly and also search engine friendly.

One thing we have always kept a close eye on is how people use & view content on our site; studying statistical information provides us with a great insight into which direction we should take PhotoArk. During our second year it became clear that people viewing our libraries didn't necessarily want to purchase images, but instead simply wanted to view and enjoy our work. So in our V4.0 update we decided to uncouple the ‘Shop’ components from the libraries, reduce the size of the watermarks, add a toggle button to hide the image properties and best of all; double the size of the images. This is just one of many things we have improved over the past year.

So, lets look to the future. We still have so many avenues left to explore, the biggest problem is picking one to go down. That said, our main focus for the third year is going to be a new online shop where you can purchase images from our Image Libraries, buy canvas prints and other merchandise such as wall/desk calendars, etc. This is something we have been planning for a while and we have already laid the foundations in our V4.0 update. You can follow our progress through our social media channels. Of course, no matter what avenue we decide to venture down we will continue to bring you our monthly blog/review/photo walk, regular library updates and new exhibitions.

Watch this space :-)