This will be an odd post, catching up with almost two weeks of not nearly enough time to participate in an interesting thread.
I'll just summarize my responses to a bunch of posts, one post per person I'm responding to (as an arbitrary division).
Gallery examplesMy preference is to display a block of thumbnails and one enlargement, all on one page. This way, the viewers can have a top level view of the gallery (or part of it) and be able to select any thumbnail of his choice, all on one page. I think this is a much better way to navigate a gallery. The following pages are such designs, but they do have their own navigation problems though.
http://www.lezarimages.com/2939OrdwayPk.php
My first reaction was "ow, cluttered!"
This doesn't work very well, and the explanatory notes are only annoying.
http://www.richardadamsphotography.com/Gal...gland/index.htm
Where are the photographs? All I see is a product site that tries to sell me services, or web links. Not a good site for showing off a photo gallery at all.
Perhaps the link died during the past ten days and I'm redirected to a main page or something, but it doesn't really say; bad usability.
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Design templates/scriptsAgreed that thumbnail size is a tradeoff. The two sites I referred to both have too many thumbnails on a page. A compromise for such a design is to limit the number of thumbnails to say six or eight in the block on a page, and be able to advance to the next block(s) on a new page for a gallery with lots of images. With a smaller thumbnail block, there is more room to fit a larger enlargement on the same page. Luminous Lanscape chooses the other extreme, in their galleries, there are NO thumbnails.
BTW, does anyone know of a non-Flash template or script that can produce such a page?
I can't say that I do, but by juggling JavaScript/ECMAscript and xmlhttp ("AJAX"), it should be doable.
Maybe that's an excuse for finally learning Ruby.
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Books and web site designAs a matter of fact, I did try to learn what I can. I started out with many html and css books, and was about to dive in. Thank god I didn't. After reading the following two books, I have a completely different view about site design. It is a heck of lot more than just HOW to code. It is more about WHAT to code! My scrutiny of others' sites are learned from these books, combined with my biased preferences.
Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
http://www.managementconsultingnews.com/in...g_interview.php
That book has seen quite a few recommendations.
I'd like to add the following books to your reading list:
Designing Web Usability - the Practice of Simplicity (Jakob Nielsen, 2000)Homepage Usability - 50 Web Sites Deconstructed (Jakob Nielsen, 2001)I also suspect that his latest book,
Prioritizing Web Usability (2006) is worth a read, but I haven't delved into it myself yet.
As with many others, I tend to prioritize by putting my time ahead of designing the perfect web pages, and allow some basic compromises that make me less than happy.
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User interface consistencyConsistency is very important. If there is inconsistency, a viewer (like me) would wonder does the inconsistency mean something.
I then must recommend that you read the following article:
The Case Against User Interface Consistency (Jonathan Grudin, 1989)Brief summary: there is a balance;
a little bit of inconsistency may be healthy.
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Colour conversion2a. After flattening and before converting to srgb, first convert a 16bit file to 8bit.
That may introduce rounding errors resulting in visible image quality loss, especially when the differences between the colour spaces are large.
While converting in 16-bit mode will still result in rounding errors, they will be less significant than if you do them in 8-bit mode.
Convert to sRGB first, then to 8-bit mode.
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CSS and floating elementsWhile I have read up on css, my coding experience is minimal. In your case, have you tried creating several nested blocks (I'm too lazy to read your source code)? That way, you can separate the links, etc. in differenent blocks and position or nest the blocks accordingly. From my reading, controlling the borders within each block or between the blocks seem quite straight forward. But then, I have yet to code such a page.
What I find frustrating is that there are plenty of css tutorials on handling text, but not many on images. I have yet to find one on how to centrally position an image in a css block. Sounds simple though.
It may sound simple, but browser bugs may get in your way here. The chance of success is greater with Opera than any other browser, and lowest with Internet Explorer.
But, in principle, if you add an alignment parameter of center for the object you want centered, it
should work. Just keep in mind that it will be centered in relation to the block around it, not the page.
Gallery critiqueIn brief, I'm most happy with Lois's site.
My own? A mish-mash of different ages of web design and photography, and unfortunately not something I've put a lot of effort into. I like the fact that I've mainly managed to stick to simplicity, but I think I'm too chatty, and that the images I present aren't interesting enough. That's why there are few updates to these images, too.
But since I may want to improve my own web visibility as a photographer and start advertising myself, I'll have to get down and dirty and find my own expression. The web presentation becomes increasingly important, and I'll be damned if I don't nail it.
In some ways, it's a bit annoying that photographers may need to acquire yet another skill set in their profession, that of specialized web design. Then again, it can be compared to composing a decent "real life" gallery exhibition, which also is a job requiring skill and experience.
