Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Digital Image Processing => Topic started by: stewarthemley on October 21, 2009, 05:51:29 am
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I think this is the right place but sorry if it's not. And apologies if this has been covered recently but I have searched and can't see anything directly relevant.
My website is way too old, has nothing really good/recent on it and I want to completely redesign it. I don't have time (or the inclination) to master any complicated programs and used a web designer before, but I want the option of making biggish changes whenever the mood takes me - expensive and inconvenient with a designer. So I stumbled across iweb, had a brief play and it seems a possibility. But before I invest hours/blood/sweat/tears designing the thing could anyone who knows be kind enough to say if iweb is okay to use or whether there are other simple options. It has to be simple as I'm at last getting busy again (thank christ). I want a minimalist style so I imagine it should be fairly straightforward... or is that famous last words? Thanks in advance.
edit to add: also looked briefly at mobile.me. Probably showing how little I know but can't see why this isn't a good thing. Any comments? Thanks.
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I think this is the right place but sorry if it's not. And apologies if this has been covered recently but I have searched and can't see anything directly relevant.
My website is way too old, has nothing really good/recent on it and I want to completely redesign it. I don't have time (or the inclination) to master any complicated programs and used a web designer before, but I want the option of making biggish changes whenever the mood takes me - expensive and inconvenient with a designer. So I stumbled across iweb, had a brief play and it seems a possibility. But before I invest hours/blood/sweat/tears designing the thing could anyone who knows be kind enough to say if iweb is okay to use or whether there are other simple options. It has to be simple as I'm at last getting busy again (thank christ). I want a minimalist style so I imagine it should be fairly straightforward... or is that famous last words? Thanks in advance.
I'm no expert at website design but iWeb is alright and it would allow you to build a basic web site very quickly. Alternatives are Sandvox (http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/) (very rigid design tool) and RapidWeaver (http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/) (no opinion ). Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/) and Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/) are more advanced tools. All four alternatives are available as demo or trial versions.
Edit: Mobile Me allows you to publish (or host) your website. It's very well integrated with iWeb. For some, it's worth the $100/year fee and for others it isn't… You'll have to decide for yourself.
Jack Dykinga's gallery is hosted there: http://www.dykinga.com/www.dykinga.com/Images.html (http://www.dykinga.com/www.dykinga.com/Images.html)
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I'm no expert at website design but iWeb is alright and it would allow you to build a basic web site very quickly. Alternatives are Sandvox (http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/) (very rigid design tool) and RapidWeaver (http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/) (no opinion ). Coda (http://www.panic.com/coda/) and Espresso (http://macrabbit.com/espresso/) are more advanced tools. All four alternatives are available as demo or trial versions.
Edit: Mobile Me allows you to publish (or host) your website. It's very well integrated with iWeb. For some, it's worth the $100/year fee and for others it isn't… You'll have to decide for yourself.
Jack Dykinga's gallery is hosted there: http://www.dykinga.com/www.dykinga.com/Images.html (http://www.dykinga.com/www.dykinga.com/Images.html)
Hi Francois. Thanks for the reply. I'll certainly have a play with the alternatives you mentioned. Yes, the mobile.me is really simple, possibly even simple enough for me, but it is pricey compared with other hosts. Although I seem to remember reading that some hosts won't work well with certain website creation programs so the integration might be worth it.
Thanks also for the website link. Its close to the sort of thing I want which shows I'm not too far off.
Can't help feeling this is yet another area that photographers have to learn at least the rudimentaries. But that's just laziness; I prefer the digital age to working through the night in a fume-filled darkroom, vinyls playing loudly, red wine disappearing...
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Have you thought about using a hosted blog?
Now WordPress allows you to have pages as well as posts, you can more or less do a whole web site without using the blogging bit at all if you don't want. The advantage of hosted (wordpress.com I think?) rather than DIY is that you don't have to worry about keeping the software patched yourself, which is a bit of a burden if you aren't a geek
There are many other blogs of course, and most have a reasonable selection of features and themes for nothing, and better facilities (e.g your own designs) if you pay an annual fee, which is usually pretty modest, especially compared to high end web software.
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Stewart, I'm using a combination of three things which make the whole process REAL EASY and quite smart-looking. I created the basic architecture of my site using Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer Visual Site Designer (http://www.coffeecup.com/designer/). It doesn't get any easier than this, but does enough for a very basic, yet pleasing, range of layouts you customize to your taste. Then for the photo galleries themselves I use Lightroom's Web module, which creates smart-looking galleries in either Flash or HTML almost literally on a mouse click, once you've selected some basic appearance options which are well laid-out in the application. The "Galleries" page of my site created in Coffee Cup contains the links to these photo galleries - Coffee CUp makes creating these hyperlinks simple. Of course you need the space on a server to host the site and the galleries. Both programs have up-loading capability to the site. but I prefer to maintain the up-dating of site content all in one FTP program called "Filezilla", which is free Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/). If you haven't done this already, you may wish to create one folder on your hard-drive say called "Website" which holds ALL the files you need for managing the site. This way, Coffee Cup, Lightroom and Filezilla all relate back to the same source, which simplifies your management. You can see my results here: markdsegal.com (http://www.markdsegal.com/) and evaluate whether this kind of thing does it for you. I'm far from any kind of expert in web design and I find what I've just laid out here very manageable, and relatively inexpensive. Filezilla is free; Coffee Cupn is cheap; the only moderately big bite is Lightroom (about $300), but this is such a brilliant multi-purpose image editing program that if you don't have it already, once you get it you'll wonder how you ever lived without it - well, OK there was life before Lightroom, but you know what I mean. You can download a trial from Adobe.
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Stewart, I'm using a combination of three things which make the whole process REAL EASY and quite smart-looking. I created the basic architecture of my site using Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer Visual Site Designer (http://www.coffeecup.com/designer/). It doesn't get any easier than this, but does enough for a very basic, yet pleasing, range of layouts you customize to your taste. Then for the photo galleries themselves I use Lightroom's Web module, which creates smart-looking galleries in either Flash or HTML almost literally on a mouse click, once you've selected some basic appearance options which are well laid-out in the application. The "Galleries" page of my site created in Coffee Cup contains the links to these photo galleries - Coffee CUp makes creating these hyperlinks simple. Of course you need the space on a server to host the site and the galleries. Both programs have up-loading capability to the site. but I prefer to maintain the up-dating of site content all in one FTP program called "Filezilla", which is free Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/). If you haven't done this already, you may wish to create one folder on your hard-drive say called "Website" which holds ALL the files you need for managing the site. This way, Coffee Cup, Lightroom and Filezilla all relate back to the same source, which simplifies your management. You can see my results here: markdsegal.com (http://www.markdsegal.com/) and evaluate whether this kind of thing does it for you. I'm far from any kind of expert in web design and I find what I've just laid out here very manageable, and relatively inexpensive. Filezilla is free; Coffee Cupn is cheap; the only moderately big bite is Lightroom (about $300), but this is such a brilliant multi-purpose image editing program that if you don't have it already, once you get it you'll wonder how you ever lived without it - well, OK there was life before Lightroom, but you know what I mean. You can download a trial from Adobe.
Mark,
I have a few problems with your site. It messes up text badly on your homepage in Opera 10.0 and on IE 8.0. On Firefox 3.5.3 it jumps immediately to the "noscript.html" page and never gives me a chance to turn on Javascript on your homepage at all (on all other sites I encounter in Firefox, the "noscript" plugin lets me toggle Java, Javascript, etc., whenever i need them -- they are off by default for security reasons). Finally, on Safari 4.03 I can actually view the website almost perfectly (the homepage text is still aligned a little off: the last word in the "orange" box, "distribution", is below the bottom of the box.
These are all Windows browsers. I suspect you are using Safari on a Mac, since that behaves the best. Now you understand why I keep four browsers on my PC.
Here is your home page on Opera: [attachment=17390:MDSegalWeb.jpg]
I had a chance to view your Iceland Coastal gallery, and I love the pictures. I will check out much more of the site (using Safari) when I have time.
Regards,
Eric M.
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Try Shutterbug: http://xtralean.com/SBOverview.html.... (http://xtralean.com/SBOverview.html....).. I built mine with it in a simple style: http://www.bernardwolf.com/ (http://www.bernardwolf.com/)
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Mark,
I have a few problems with your site.
I had a chance to view your Iceland Coastal gallery, and I love the pictures. I will check out much more of the site (using Safari) when I have time.
Regards,
Eric M.
Hi Eric, Thanks, glad you like the Iceland images.
I'm surprised you had these problems with the website. This is the first such notification I've received. But overlapping text has happened to me too on my own machine, and the solution here was to make sure the magnification ratio of the web browser was set at 100%. At appropriate settings (in my case 100% on a LaCie 321 1600*1200 resolution display) everything fell into place correctly. I just now checked on it by entering the site like any user would and it shows fine on my display. I also checked it on my wife's computer - she has a Dell display operating at 1024*768, 100% magnification, Internet Exploder and no problem there either. I'm on a PC with Windows XP SP2 and either Internet Exploder or Mozilla Firefox, whichever behaves better. I suggest you check your browser settings and please do let me know if you can solve it.
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I recently had to design a website for a group of teachers. I went onto YouTube to see if there was any videos on web design that they could watch. The first video I saw was a teenager whose first advice was go to http://www.freecsstemplates.org (http://www.freecsstemplates.org) and pick a template. There are a number of sites like this around that have free templates that are creative commons. All they ask is that you keep the footer details. With a little knowledge of web design you can have a functioning web site up in a short time. Mostly its a matter of creating a master template and then creating pages and changing the links and the photographs on the pages.
Jalbum, http://jalbum.net (http://jalbum.net) has free software for creating albums for your photographs. Simple to set up and use.
Cheers,
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Wow. Some great advice and plenty of options to check. Thanks to you all.
Francois, RapidWeaver looks good so I will download that this weekend and have a play. Thanks for the link.
Lois, thanks for the idea of using a blog page. It hadn’t occurred to me. There might be a problem with being able to arrange the images I want but it’s certainly an option I will explore.
Mark, thanks for your detailed reply and the links. The workflow seems attractive, especially the “REAL EASY” bit! As I’m aiming for a minimalist feel, I really don’t think I need bells or whistles so I will try your route as well. I do have Lightroom and played with the gallery bit but I wanted to be able to move text around and couldn’t see how to do that. Maybe I’ll look again because you’re right about how easy it is to create a gallery. By the way, I like the images on your site, especially the London pubs. I think I have probably sampled most of them…
Wolfman, thanks for your link. Your site is fairly simple, in a positive way, and the sort of thing I will probably do. Some great product shots there.
Tom b, isn’t it great when teenagers show you how to do it… but I guess that’s ageist. Thanks for your link and I’ll also give it a look.
There’s a lot to check here but I will plough through as fast as possible. Thanks again everyone and if I happen to come up with a site that looks like any of yours, I promise I won’t have copied you – it’s quite difficult to be very different when keeping it simple. When the thing is finished I’ll include the address in my posts. To be honest, I haven’t done so up to now to save my embarrassment!
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I think this is the right place but sorry if it's not. And apologies if this has been covered recently but I have searched and can't see anything directly relevant.
You may get more responses at the User Critiques forum, and can view critiques of others' sites.
If you are patient and a glutton for punishment, you may find this thread helpful:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....showtopic=13890 (http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=13890)
Caution: This is an old thread, and many reviewed sites might have been revised by now.
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Stewart, I'm using a combination of three things which make the whole process REAL EASY and quite smart-looking. I created the basic architecture of my site using Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer Visual Site Designer (http://www.coffeecup.com/designer/). It doesn't get any easier than this, but does enough for a very basic, yet pleasing, range of layouts you customize to your taste. Then for the photo galleries themselves I use Lightroom's Web module, which creates smart-looking galleries in either Flash or HTML almost literally on a mouse click, once you've selected some basic appearance options which are well laid-out in the application. The "Galleries" page of my site created in Coffee Cup contains the links to these photo galleries - Coffee CUp makes creating these hyperlinks simple. Of course you need the space on a server to host the site and the galleries. Both programs have up-loading capability to the site. but I prefer to maintain the up-dating of site content all in one FTP program called "Filezilla", which is free Filezilla (http://filezilla-project.org/). If you haven't done this already, you may wish to create one folder on your hard-drive say called "Website" which holds ALL the files you need for managing the site. This way, Coffee Cup, Lightroom and Filezilla all relate back to the same source, which simplifies your management. You can see my results here: markdsegal.com (http://www.markdsegal.com/) and evaluate whether this kind of thing does it for you. I'm far from any kind of expert in web design and I find what I've just laid out here very manageable, and relatively inexpensive. Filezilla is free; Coffee Cupn is cheap; the only moderately big bite is Lightroom (about $300), but this is such a brilliant multi-purpose image editing program that if you don't have it already, once you get it you'll wonder how you ever lived without it - well, OK there was life before Lightroom, but you know what I mean. You can download a trial from Adobe.
I have also been toying with the idea of integrating galleries generated with Lightroom templates to a site. But as mentioned in another thread, and noted on yours, there are problems that I have yet to solve:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....38069&st=15 (http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=38069&st=15)
"I've been thinking about using Lightroom web gallery templates for my own site. But I have yet to figure out how to customize the galleries so that they match with other pages. Your site is a good example of the problems I try to solve. The galleries' background color is different from the other pages'. The font type, color and size on a gallery page is different from the other pages'"
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Have you thought about using a hosted blog?
I have never quite figured out what makes blogs so special. For me, forums such as LL's have many advantages not found in most blogs.
- Forums are much better organized by topics, and posts are better threaded to follow.
- Each forum topic category or thread can be viwed individually, making the page short and concise.
- You can pinpoint seach forum archives by keywords, authors and dates, etc.
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Stewart, thanks glad you enjoyed the images.
There are limitations to text entries in LR galleries; however, LR 2.5 does provide a fair bit of latitude for customization. Not surprised if it can't be made to exactly match with other pages generated in other programs, but I think playing between the customization options for both the "other pages" and the web galleries in LR, one can cobble together a coherent ensemble.
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Chris_T, thanks for the suggestion re user critiques forum - hadn't thought of looking there. Also, I took a deep breath and followed the thread link you gave and found it really useful. Especially the bits where you and others want to see all the images in each gallery and be able to select which to enlarge without having to scroll through all of them. iweb does that and I keep finding myself drawn back to it.
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I have never quite figured out what makes blogs so special. For me, forums such as LL's have many advantages not found in most blogs.
- Forums are much better organized by topics, and posts are better threaded to follow.
- Each forum topic category or thread can be viwed individually, making the page short and concise.
- You can pinpoint seach forum archives by keywords, authors and dates, etc.
They are addressing a different purpose, surely? Forum posts are threaded, blog posts are usually individual topics, perhaps with follow-up comments from the poster and viewers. Keyword and date search can be catered for by bloggers who understand a bit about information design (so, not many, I agree) - and many blogs have easy tagging and categorisation there for the using.
You wouldn't use a forum to present a body of photographic work, and you wouldn't use a blog to host a discussion! But you could use a blog that has pages as well as posts (like blogengine.net and WordPress) to create a web site with navigation to a defined set of topics - just as you might start from scratch in Notepad, DreamWeaver or whatever. The big advantage for the novice coder is not having to know HTML. But you still need to understand IA to do it well, as you would with conventional tools.
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There are limitations to text entries in LR galleries; however, LR 2.5 does provide a fair bit of latitude for customization. Not surprised if it can't be made to exactly match with other pages generated in other programs, but I think playing between the customization options for both the "other pages" and the web galleries in LR, one can cobble together a coherent ensemble.
Matching the LR galleries' colors and fonts is just the tip of the ice berg. How about adding the header, menu and footer etc. that are on other pages? I believe all these can be done by someone who can read and edit a LR gallery's source code.
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Chris_T, thanks for the suggestion re user critiques forum - hadn't thought of looking there. Also, I took a deep breath and followed the thread link you gave and found it really useful. Especially the bits where you and others want to see all the images in each gallery and be able to select which to enlarge without having to scroll through all of them. iweb does that and I keep finding myself drawn back to it.
You will be handsomely rewarded if you read this book first before building a site:
http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-U...8624&sr=8-1 (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Me-Think-Usability/dp/0321344758/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255878624&sr=8-1)
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They are addressing a different purpose, surely? Forum posts are threaded, blog posts are usually individual topics, perhaps with follow-up comments from the poster and viewers. Keyword and date search can be catered for by bloggers who understand a bit about information design (so, not many, I agree) - and many blogs have easy tagging and categorisation there for the using.
You wouldn't use a forum to present a body of photographic work, and you wouldn't use a blog to host a discussion! But you could use a blog that has pages as well as posts (like blogengine.net and WordPress) to create a web site with navigation to a defined set of topics - just as you might start from scratch in Notepad, DreamWeaver or whatever. The big advantage for the novice coder is not having to know HTML. But you still need to understand IA to do it well, as you would with conventional tools.
Agreed that blogs and forums serve different purposes. But many blogs are used to host discussions. In this thread's context, a site's galleries will host the photos, and a forum instead of a blog can support discussions much better. To install a forum such as LL's, I don't believe you need any coding experience.
My comments are about the vast majority of the blogs. Typically, a blog page will include images and text for a long duration (a week or a month). Loading such a page can take forever. There is no way to reference and just load a single comment or image, or start there. Not being able to pin point search a blog's archives is really a shame, making valued information lost forever.
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Matching the LR galleries' colors and fonts is just the tip of the ice berg. How about adding the header, menu and footer etc. that are on other pages? I believe all these can be done by someone who can read and edit a LR gallery's source code.
All this depends upon one's needs and tastes. The OP asked for something easy to manage which produces attractive results.
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Matching the LR galleries' colors and fonts is just the tip of the ice berg. How about adding the header, menu and footer etc. that are on other pages? I believe all these can be done by someone who can read and edit a LR gallery's source code.
Because of my day job (non-photographic) I haven't had a chance to go into the various sections of the LR gallery code. It's quite complicated as I recall (at work right now), with multiple files that may need editing. I took the easy way out and figured out how to place the menu bars and copyright line into the HTML file that got generated from LR. I was able to match things so that the website was consistent across pages. It was a bit of a kludge using Dreamweaver to do this but it worked. I still want to add Pay Pal functionality to individual images but that's also will have to wait until I've got a couple of days off. I've looked at some of the LR plugins but didn't like the contraints they imposed (you are limited by what the author of the plug in thinks is the right way rather than what you would like). LR also generates web pages that don't work with some hosts and the LR engine and two of the other files need to be modified. This is a well known problem.
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Alan,
If we revert to post #1 in this thread, Stewart said "it has to be simple......" Would you recommend Dreamweaver on that basis?
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Alan,
If we revert to post #1 in this thread, Stewart said "it has to be simple......" Would you recommend Dreamweaver on that basis?
NO!!! In fact, it would be great if LR 3.0 made it easier to modify for web output without have to go in and do the programming (Obviously agreeing with the OP, just noting that it can be done and that I always want to know how things work).
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... it would be great if LR 3.0 made it easier to modify for web output without have to go in and do the programming ...
Bingo! That's exactly what I would like to see, but I won't hold my breath. If Adobe should do that, not only would many web "designers" go out of business, but Dreamweaver sales will take a hit. The next best thing is for a LR plugin to do this.
BTW, you did a good job with your LR galleries to match other pages.
Creating a web site is not unlike taking a photograph. Anyone can come up with a "simple" one with a template (or a click), but a good one takes insight and hard work.
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So I stumbled across iweb, had a brief play and it seems a possibility. But before I invest hours/blood/sweat/tears designing the thing could anyone who knows be kind enough to say if iweb is okay to use or whether there are other simple options.
tough call, not sure what your end goals are.
iWeb is simple yet lets you create a pretty extensive site that flows together decently well, gives decent looking results, and is more customizable than most realize. I use it and it gets the job done. Seems to be reliable enough, and it's easy to tie into any host is so it's pretty automatic to keep the site updated.
I use it, and sure it's not the most sophisticated or spectacular results in the world, but then I'm probably the only one that ever reads my website anyway ... good enough for me. I just like trying to improve my writing skills, so I write stuff. Biggest downside is you can't pull the site back into another program to do more advanced stuff.
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Plenty of helpful advice here, but I'll add a comment referring to the use of blogging software. In the context of this discussion I think that it is overlooked that an application like Wordpress, while it is first a blogging tool, it is also a CMS (Content Management System) albeit a fairly simple one. There are Wordpress installations which have little resemblance to a traditional blog with the chronological topical entries we expect blogs to have. There are photo gallery themes which are free or available for little cost which may work for some users seeing this thread. And, of course, there are Wordpress photo sites which are more sophisticated, requiring more coding skills.
Another blogging application is the free, open-source, Pixelpost. These can be setup with no written article areas and simply be a gallery. It's up to the user. I once had a Pixelpost site, on which there was no writing other than image descriptions, an About page, Contact, etc.
For the OP it still may be easiest to go with the other suggestions, but one can also experiment with Wordpress for free, if only on a separate site in an effort to learn a bit for future web offerings. The nice thing about Wordpress is that they have done a good job with security updates and the updates are now very easy for the user to do with just a simple click or two.
I'm not pushing Wordpress or other tool, just hoping to clarify that a CMS can be used in many ways to achieve one's goals. I don't use Wordpress (though I have built sites with it), however I do suggest (as others above have) that it may be right for some folks. And if one wants a discussion forum added, it's little more than installing a forum package in another directory, linked from other site pages... just like here on LL or anywhere else.
Cheers.
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Another vote for Rapidweaver. It can be used as simply as iWeb, with a wealth of stock templates, or taken off the beaten path to a fully custom design solution. I built my site from scratch with it and no template, knowing nothing about web design before I started. I had to learn a few things about CSS in the process, but it is remarkably easy to master compared to HTML. There were a couple of occasional headaches in getting everything to work right with older versions of IE, but nothing was all that frustrating. It really surprises me that something as open and accessible, built on the premise of lots of upgradeable plugins, works as well as it does. There are also a great many tutorials online now for it as well.
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As a matter of courtesy to people who replied, here’s a brief update.
Lightroom is out, for me. It’s simply not designed to be a website design program – and doesn’t claim to be. Yes, it can produce good looking galleries but getting them into a website to match the other pages is beyond me right now.
iweb is incredibly simple/fast to master and use. One of the most intuitive programs I’ve used just lately. But for me it has a major limitation: you can’t get the image past 800x600 pixels (as far as I can see, and having checked on user groups – but great if I’m wrong). Also, the way to check the results in a browser is clumsy and just crashes (new Macpro, Snow Leopard - the latter might be the reason).
Rapidweaver looks good, really good, but so far Shutterbug is the star for me (thanks, Wolfman). There was that usual learning curve where everything was coated in a nice pink haze but that cleared after maybe an hour of good, concentrated cursing and now it’s looking incredibly good value. I have no connection and here’s the link for anyone interested: http://xtralean.com/SBOverview.html (http://xtralean.com/SBOverview.html)
As soon as I have completed the thing I’ll include the address in my signature. I have to select all the images – is there anything more difficult? – so it may take a little while.
Again, thanks to all who replied and I found every reply useful.
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Thanks for the up-date Stewart. Probably useful to note (for the benefit of Windows folks) that ShutterBug is Mac only.
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Thanks for the up-date Stewart. Probably useful to note (for the benefit of Windows folks) that ShutterBug is Mac only.
Whoops. You're right, Mark. I should have pointed that out.
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iweb is incredibly simple/fast to master and use. One of the most intuitive programs I’ve used just lately. But for me it has a major limitation: you can’t get the image past 800x600 pixels (as far as I can see, and having checked on user groups – but great if I’m wrong). Also, the way to check the results in a browser is clumsy and just crashes (new Macpro, Snow Leopard - the latter might be the reason).
as far as image past 800x600 ... not sure what you mean. Are you talking about a gallery page? I know normal pages aren't limited. A page (http://www.cwaynefox.com/Capture/Entries/2007/10/9_The_amazing_Phaseone_P45_Back.html) from my site, image is 1000 pixels wide.
I guess I've never even consider gallery images larger than this ... just makes them better for people to steal for screensavers and desktop pictures.
Not sure what is clumsy ... and why it would crash. Best way to develop for me is just publish the thing and then check it. Isn't that slow. Not like it's messed up very often. How are you checking the results that would be clumsy and crash?
(not that it matters if you've decided on Shutterbug anyway - it does look intriguing)
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Hi Wayne
Thanks for your reply and page link, that’s just what I wanted to see. Obviously you can get images (not just pages) past 800 pixels. I checked on an Apple user group and the consensus there was that you couldn’t. Think I’ll get back there smartish and make a post… I suspect that the reason I couldn’t get them bigger was that they were images I had re-sized for my existing (crappy) website and so they were at max anyway. I’ll check later today.
Re the clumsy bit: on all the other website design programs you simply hit a button and see instantly how the site will look in a browser – not always the same. With iweb, again according to the user group so it might not be accurate, you have to publish the site to a folder on your computer then view in your browser. Clumsy, bit slow, bit surprising but okay if it works. But on my system (new Macpro, Snow Leopard) iweb crashes as soon as I hit the publish button. This is probably a bug with SL, or a conflict with something on my system.
So, now I have to decide between iweb and Shutterbug. Maybe I'll try first to set the thing up with iweb simply because it’s so easy and already on my system. It’ll be a hassle downloading the site, adjusting, rechecking, etc but I shouldn’t have to do that too often – hopefully. And if that's just too fiddly, I'll fall back on SB. Either way I'll have achieved the aim of being able to change my site easily to how I want it.
Like your website, by the way. Thanks again.
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It’ll be a hassle downloading the site, adjusting, rechecking, etc but I shouldn’t have to do that too often – hopefully.
With iWeb if you publish via FTP, it will only publish changes you have made. This is the major drawback to publishing to a folder, where it publishes the entire site each time. So if you are wanting to check your pages on your local machine this is a little bit of a hassle.
There is a pretty easy way around this, however. Each mac has Apache web server installed. You can set up iWeb to publish to your "local" webserver via FTP. Once you do that, you can access the site using the standard local host addres ... either enter 127.0.0.1 as the address, or simply type localhost.
This way each time you want to check things in a browser you publish the site, which will only have to update changes, and then pop over. It's actually very fast.
There are basically two steps. First you turn on your local webserver in the sharing preference pane.
In iWeb, set it to publish to FTP Server. The site name is Documents (which is the default folder name for the local host).
In the FTP server settings, the server address is localhost. The user name is your account name for your mac followed by your password. the directory/path is /Library/WebServer and the Protocol is FTP. Once you have the FTP server settings setup, you should be able to click the Test Connection Button and it should let you know it succeeded. If so, you're ready to publish the site. The first time you publish the site it will tell you the folder Documents already exists and ask if you want to replace it.
Once it's published just enter localhost in your web browser (or IP 127.0.0.1). As I said the advantage is you when you publish from then on, only your changes are published. This usually takes only seconds if you have just modified a page or two.
This actually works with most web development tools. You can in fact enable virtual hosts for the local host, meaning you can develop a multitude of sites and access them each individually on your local machine.
Once everything is ready to go, just change the configuration to upload to the actual host.
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There is a pretty easy way around this, however. Each mac has Apache web server installed. You can set up iWeb to publish to your "local" webserver via FTP. Once you do that, you can access the site using the standard local host addres ... either enter 127.0.0.1 as the address, or simply type localhost.
If you end up creating a dynamic site with some mysql/php server side components that you want to test locally, you might want to check MAMP (http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html).
Cheers,
Bernard
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Thanks, Wayne, for that detailed info. I'd noticed that I had a server somewhere on my system but it seemed a step too far to try to play with it. But it does look like a quick solution for checking. And it's a good point that only changes are uploaded to a published site each time so that would be much less hassle. Actually, I tried again to load my iweb site to a local folder and this time it worked. I changed nothing, no new programs, no system update so not sure what happened with the first few attempts.
And thanks Bernard for that link. Who knows, I might end up learning more than I expected and need that facility. Seems to be a popular route with this new digital thingy we all do: start out trying to grasp the basics then end up firmly in the competent level. Well, almost.
As I often do, given a choice I vacillate wildly. Today I'm back to favoring Shutterbug again. It lets me move stuff around a little bit more which is the whole object of this exercise. I have a SB version and an iweb version and switching between the two I prefer the SB one. I'm pretty certain I'll use one of those programs but whichever, progress is being made, thanks to the contributions made here, so thanks again everyone.
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Again out of courtesy to those who helped, I have the site up now. It's very simple, so I resisted the temptation to use any of the bells and whistles that are so easy to add. I still have to sort out the images, but the layout is okay for now. The aim was to be able to change things quickly and easily and that has been achieved. I used Shutterbug in the end and thoroughly recommend it (no association with them). The site is at: www.stewarthemley.com
Thanks again for all the help offered.
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The images are great - you have a real eye for telling details.
(But the page width needs fixing, as it is too wide for a 1280 wide screen. In fact, better to avoid fixing it at all if you have the technical wherewithal, as it makes life much simpler for all users and all screens. You can always impose constraints flexibly in the style sheet.)
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The images are great - you have a real eye for telling details.
(But the page width needs fixing, as it is too wide for a 1280 wide screen. In fact, better to avoid fixing it at all if you have the technical wherewithal, as it makes life much simpler for all users and all screens. You can always impose constraints flexibly in the style sheet.)
Thanks very much, Lois. You're right about the page width: I checked it on my wife's very small mini-laptop screen (don't know the correct term for the latest crop of very small ones) and it went off the edges. I also checked it on what is probably a more common screen size - 19" - and adjusted things to fit. I have to find out if/how to make it automatically fit any size screen.
But the great thing for me is the ability to change quickly and easily. I've used three different backgrounds already!
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Stewart,
Congratulations for your new website and for your photos too. Building your site took some time but the result is really worth the time you spent.
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Stewart,
Congratulations for your new website and for your photos too. Building your site took some time but the result is really worth the time you spent.
Thank you for your kind words, Francois.
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Stewart,
Congratulations for your new website and for your photos too. Building your site took some time but the result is really worth the time you spent.
Stewart,
I agree totally with Francois. Your website is elegant, simple and easy to navigate. Very fine work, too. I'm tempted to redesign my own website all over again.
Eric
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Hi Eric. That's very kind of you, thanks. I thoroughly recommend Shutterbug (repeat: no connection, just a satisfied user). At first I thought it might be beyond me but with a little perseverance, I believe most people can do it.