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stewarthemley

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website redesign using iweb
« on: October 21, 2009, 05:51:29 am »

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.
« Last Edit: October 21, 2009, 05:59:01 am by stewarthemley »
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francois

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« Reply #1 on: October 21, 2009, 06:01:33 am »

Quote from: stewarthemley
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 (very rigid design tool) and   RapidWeaver (no opinion ). Coda and  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
« Last Edit: October 21, 2009, 06:09:54 am by francois »
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Francois

stewarthemley

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website redesign using iweb
« Reply #2 on: October 21, 2009, 06:36:26 am »

Quote from: francois
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 (very rigid design tool) and   RapidWeaver (no opinion ). Coda and  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

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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LoisWakeman

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website redesign using iweb
« Reply #3 on: October 21, 2009, 07:17:55 am »

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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Mark D Segal

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« Reply #4 on: October 21, 2009, 09:42:07 am »

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. 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. 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 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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Eric Myrvaagnes

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« Reply #5 on: October 21, 2009, 12:34:23 pm »

Quote from: MarkDS
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. 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. 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 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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Wolfman

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« Reply #6 on: October 21, 2009, 12:52:24 pm »

Try Shutterbug: http://xtralean.com/SBOverview.html...... I built mine with it in a simple style: http://www.bernardwolf.com/
« Last Edit: October 21, 2009, 12:52:43 pm by Wolfman »
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Mark D Segal

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« Reply #7 on: October 21, 2009, 01:11:36 pm »

Quote from: EricM
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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tom b

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« Reply #8 on: October 21, 2009, 06:58:23 pm »

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 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 has free software for creating albums for your photographs. Simple to set up and use.

Cheers,
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Tom Brown

stewarthemley

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website redesign using iweb
« Reply #9 on: October 22, 2009, 04:40:01 am »

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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Chris_T

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« Reply #10 on: October 22, 2009, 09:38:53 am »

Quote from: stewarthemley
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

Caution: This is an old thread, and many reviewed sites might have been revised by now.
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Chris_T

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« Reply #11 on: October 22, 2009, 09:43:34 am »

Quote from: MarkDS
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. 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. 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 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

"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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Chris_T

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« Reply #12 on: October 22, 2009, 09:50:45 am »

Quote from: LoisWakeman
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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Mark D Segal

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« Reply #13 on: October 22, 2009, 09:53:12 am »

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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stewarthemley

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website redesign using iweb
« Reply #14 on: October 22, 2009, 11:29:24 am »

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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LoisWakeman

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« Reply #15 on: October 23, 2009, 03:52:14 am »

Quote from: Chris_T
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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Chris_T

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« Reply #16 on: October 23, 2009, 09:43:56 am »

Quote from: MarkDS
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

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« Reply #17 on: October 23, 2009, 09:47:32 am »

Quote from: stewarthemley
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
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Chris_T

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« Reply #18 on: October 23, 2009, 09:57:42 am »

Quote from: LoisWakeman
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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Mark D Segal

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« Reply #19 on: October 23, 2009, 01:15:11 pm »

Quote from: Chris_T
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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