Introducing The Barkives, my very own dog photography collection.
It is a project that has taken up a good chunk of my time over the last 6 months. Not every image is loaded yet because the enormity of that got the best of me (and my rear end). About 75% of the breeds have only 20 images loaded but more are being added every day.
The Barkives is something that I have wanted to do for a very long time, but the scale of the project kept scaring me away. I’ll be honest here and say that what really prompted me to get the ball rolling was the fact that a really large stock company made a considerable amount of money off my hard work and creativity. I got a few pennies and they got the rest. I knew that was the case when I signed with them but still, it burned me.
So being the anti-establishment kind of person that I am, I decided to take a huge risk with this and just jump off the cliff. I’m not scared. All the risks I have ever taken have paid off for me.
Aside from that, I could never find an out of the box software product that would adequately meet all of my needs. I knew I had to hire someone to create it for me and had casually shopped the concept around. No one would agree to touch it with a ten foot pole. I understood why.
Then one day I clicked on the website of a blog commenter and was taken to Ribbons of Red design. I had found my web designer. I asked her if she was up to the challenge and she didn’t even blink an eye before saying yes. Plus she is a dog person (2 Bassets!) and I tend to only work with dog people because they RULE!
Just having my images is fun and all but I wanted a little bit more. So I added Dog Tails which are behind the scenes stories of what was going on when an image was made.
In conjunction with the project, I have also been wanting to create my own Database of Dogs around the globe, so we added The D List. This growing database will allow me to pull dogs as needed for a variety of projects. If you have a dog, be sure to add them because you never know where I am going to end up.
. . . . . .
This site was definitely a collaborative effort and I can not take credit for all of it.
So I have to thank a few people.
> To Renee who wasn’t scared in the least bit to take on this larger than life project. The design concept she created and executed is so perfectly me I can’t thank her enough.
> To Brad who I know worked late hours into the night and sacrificed time with his family to get the bones of this site just right. He was so patient, educating me on exciting subjects such as SSL, Merchant Accounts, Pagination, and all things Expression Engine related.
> To Melissa for coming up with the most adorable name ever for my site and also naming The D List. She is my go-to girl for all things witty.
> To my Mom and Sister for taking a no-mercy approach to proofreading all the content which included flow, grammar, and punctuation. If there is anything wrong, it is their fault :)
> To my husband who spent one entire weekend helping me set up (warning geek alert!) a Data Loader for HTML forms script. Then spent additional hours running batches for me so that I didn’t have to create each individual product. This is huge because as I type this, there are currently 752 images and growing.
> To Gracie for keeping me company while I tagged and categorized each and every image you see on the site.
by Erin
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