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A History of [bi] Visuals

A short history of my website from the launch of BJI Photography in April 2007 when I was just 13 years old to the [bi] Visuals site that's now online nearly five years later.

Nine months after designing version 6.0, I decided to separate my personal site and [bi] Visuals into two independent websites. I created a new personal site based on Wordpress at brianiannone.com that has information on all my projects and is home to my blog. [bi] Visuals, which is my professional portfolio, is now located in a subdomain at visuals.brianiannone.com.

I liked the appearance of [bi] Visuals v5, but just three months after finishing it, I found an HTML grid system that I thought I could create something even cleaner looking with. So, I started work on a new site. It was with this update that I also changed the name to [bi] Visuals.

After only a few weeks of coding, version 5.0 was complete. This is still the current version of the [bi] Visuals website that I have online today. The site features 136 of my photos that I've shot across four continents, each of which are displayed at a resolution of 940 pixel wide. There are six videos available to watch and download in 1080p, along with two additional videos (one in 2K) under [bi] Visuals Projects.

The site consists of a modern minimalist design built on completely W3C valid HTML5 code and includes CSS3 elements along with image sliders and embedded Vimeo videos.

This was the first version of the site that required writing HTML code. Before this, all I used were WYSIWYG web editors like iWeb. (Which is why they all looked so Web 1.0-like...)

The site was coded entirely in valid HTML5 and featured large 850-pixel wide photos as well as embedded Vimeo videos and alternate versions that used the HTML5 video tag. The main photo on the home page was especially large at 1300x867. Every image on the site, including the favicon, Apple Touch Icons, social media icons and all the photos were hosted on Rackspace's Cloud Files CDN. I used an achromatic color scheme of only black and white for the design to attract attention to the photos.

The site was comprised of two sections; one part called [bi+p] that displayed my photography work and another called [bi+v] which had my videos. Both names were still in reference to Brian Iannone Photography and Videography.

Version 4.0 was the fourth complete redesign of the site, but it was also the third redesign I did in 2009. I used Flash... (I now avoid even visiting Flash websites.) I found a template that I liked (at the time) and thought I'd use it to update my site. This design lasted for about six months.

Here's the third revision of the site. I was 15 years old when I completed this one. Notice that the name BJI Photography is gone. While I didn't officially change from that name until April 2010, I started using "Brian Iannone Photography" on my website starting with this redesign. I used iWeb again to create it, but made a custom template for the design and layout of the main site. For each of the photo galleries, I used SimpleViewer.

I also added a section to the site for videos. A few months before I did this site, I shot two videos; Color Flow and Clouds - Time Lapse. I added both to a section called "Brian Iannone Videography."

This was also the first version of the site to be hosted directly at brianiannone.com. Starting with this revision, bjiphotography.com became a forwarder which sent visitors to the new domain.

This was version 2.0 of the BJI Photography site. I made it in Apple iWeb using a built-in template. I included photos from my summer 2007 trip to France and Réunion Island, so I was able to remove all the less interesting photos and galleries from v1.0.

I also registered the domain brianiannone.com and had it forward to this site which was still located at bjiphotography.com.

This was the first website I ever made. I created it in Yahoo! SiteBuilder using a template. As you can tell, it's a typical Web 1.0-style website. I came up with the name "BJI Photography" for the title of the site and to identity my photography and registered the domain name bjiphotography.com. I was 13 years old at the time.

A few months after I created the site, I went to Réunion Island during my summer vacation. I shot about 1,500 photos during my trip, yet despite the notice on the home page stating that photos from Réunion were going to be added on September 15, 2007, I didn't upload any of them until more than a year later in the next redesign.