Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => The Coffee Corner => Topic started by: Eric Myrvaagnes on November 24, 2019, 11:11:21 pm
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I built my own photography website ten years ago, for a couple of reasons: (1) I wanted to learn abit about html and web site design, and (2) I wanted to be in control of all aspects of it. Previously I had used an inexpensive website tool that didn't give me much flexibility.
My primitive design has worked pretty well for me, but it is a bear to make significant changes such as adding a new gallery. Although I never try to look at online photos on anything smaller than a desktop PC, I have become painfully aware that others (with better eyesight than mine) do like to use tablets or cell phones to view websites, so I recently decided to try to redo my site to make it "friendlier" to small screens.
For part of the construction of individual galleries, I make use of a wonderful little utility called Breezebrowser from breezesys.com (http://breezesys.com) , which comes with a collection of a dozen or so html generators. After trying out several of them, I decided to go with the Slideshow generator. I modified it to make two more slideshow-based generators that suited my purposes, one which I use to generate a gallery index page, with one image from each gallery having a link to that gallery, and another for individual galleries, with no links.
The timing of this update coincided with my wife's publication of her first book of poetry, so our "family" website now lets you go from the opening page either to my photo site or her writing site.
There are surely glitches in the new site, and I would appreciate hearing comments from anyone on LuLa. So far it seems to look OK on either Chrome or Firefox, but sometimes gets the background color wrong on Opera. The site is http://myrvaagnes.com (http://myrvaagnes.com)
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Eric,
It displays fine in Safari on my Mac, on the iPad and on the iPhone. However, the problem I see is that the design is not 'responsive.' You get served a fixed width page regardless of the display device. If you are inclined, take a look at something like Weebly.com which allows a very quick (and free) website design.
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It works very well for me.
BUT:
I love that kind of photography. Thanks
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Works fine, but indeed the fixed width can be frustrating for larger screens, where the photos end up too small.
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Eric it works fine on my PC using Chrome, and the content is excellent; some really stellar images there. I do agree with Paulo and Rajan about the image sizes, though. A fixed width of 550 px comes through as really small on my 2560 x 1440 monitor.
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Thanks for the useful feedback, folks. I am building a "to do" list for improvements. It may take a while, but I'll get to them.
-Eric
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The two main suggestions I received so far were:
1. Make the default images size bigger, for those with large screens, and
2. Make the site "responsive" (in particular images) for the convenience of those who use small screens like pads or phones.
Thanks to easy-to-understand tutorials from W3Schools.com, I believe I have accomplished both of those goals now.
If the larger size of images isn't big enough now, I advise you to use CTRL+ and CTRL- (or whatever those are on a Mac) to resize images.
I would be happy to hear more comments and suggestions. On my website, if you scroll down on the "About Eric" page, you can click on "Click Here To Email Me" to use your email client to send me an email. Or post suggestions here on LuLa.
Thanks for looking, and Happy Thanksgiving Day to all who are celebrating that tomorrow.
-Eric
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Eric, a couple of comments.
First, I don't see why it should take two clicks to get to a gallery's photos, one to get to the gallery title image and another to get to the rest.
Second, it used to be possible to navigate within a gallery in your site using the arrow keys. Now (at least using Safari under Mojave), it's not.
Jeremy
PS: what breed is the little white dog? She looks very like my wife's Zuchon.
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Thanks for the suggestions, Jeremy.
I read your post just as I was in the process of increasing the number of clicks it takes to get to a gallery.
I have now stopped that process, and figured out a way I can reduce the number of clicks. It will take me a few days to get that straightened out. I'll post again here when that is ready.
As for the arrow keys for navigation: The html-generators I have been modifying are sufficiently different from the code in my previous web site that it hasn't (yet) been obvious to me how to do it yet. However, that is a high priority for me, and I expect that I can find a W3Schools tutorial that will show me how.
I will certainly post here again when I've got that going, too.
Regards,
Eric
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Aargh!
I have now screwed things up by making the website more complicated than is good. Thus, it is currently broken, but I expect to have it fixed by tomorrow some time.
The good news is I now know how to let the left- and right-arrow keys move you to "previous" or "next" image.
More on this in the next day or two.
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Aargh!
I have now screwed things up by making the website more complicated than is good. Thus, it is currently broken, but I expect to have it fixed by tomorrow some time.
The good news is I now know how to let the left- and right-arrow keys move you to "previous" or "next" image.
More on this in the next day or two.
Eric, I feel for you.
I know what it's like building and maintaining your own website. At times it feels like one step forwards and two steps back!
Persevere, my friend, it'll all be worth it!
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Eric,
It displays fine in Safari on my Mac, on the iPad and on the iPhone. However, the problem I see is that the design is not 'responsive.' You get served a fixed width page regardless of the display device. If you are inclined, take a look at something like Weebly.com which allows a very quick (and free) website design.
Weebly was my way in.
It's not perfect - nothing is - and there are heaps of different sites with what I feel are far more elegant looks to them than mine - Weebly provides a huge selection itself - but I am a technophobe of the highest oder, and nothing would discourage me more than having to learn something new and technical. On the other hand, for those of an added mathematical or mechanical bent, I can see (almost) the pleasures to be derived from this sort of masochism. My head is starting to ache at the very thought!
I don't do crosswords either. My wife loved them.
Rob
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The only suggestion I have is to get an SSL certificate for your website. Some search engines will not bring up your website without one. It's not a major cost but SSLs are pretty much the default these days. I know what you have gone through with the website design. I did the same thing about 10 years ago. I wanted to learn HTML and bought a copy of Dreamweaver CS4 to help automate some things (still have it installed and it works just fine though it won't up load files for some reason so I use FileZilla for that purpose). I took the easy way out and have been using LR's HTML web creation feature to generate the basic layouts and then hand code the tabs and page titles. It was a good decision not to do Flash at the time since that will no longer be supported.
Our local public high school teaches web design as an elective class and there are a lot of young people who are great at doing things. A couple of them are setting up a side business helping people set up web commerce sites.
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TLS certs are free: https://letsencrypt.org.
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TLS certs are free: https://letsencrypt.org.
Cool, didn't know about this. I think my SSL certificate is good for two years and when it's up, I'll look to using this one. Go Daddy has been raising it's rates pretty dramatically. I already have an Amazon Web Storage account that I use for file back up and archiving. I can use it to host my website as well and save money.
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Thanks for all the suggestions, guys.
I finally have a reasonably working version of the website up just a few minutes ago.
You can now use arrow keys (left and right) to move to the previous or next in any gallery or index, and the up-arrow will take you to the main index of galleries.
There are still some ugly but generally harmless bits floating around that I haven't yet cleaned up. So far I have been finding the errors by studying the code (which is inefficient but a good way to learn stuff!) I haven't run this through an html validator yet, but I will soon.
Then I'll get certified! Thanks for the link, Aram!
Another item on my todo list is to add gallery names to the thumbnails in the gallery index, and make those thumbnails (or the larger images) links to the named galleries.
Then it's time to get back to photography. :)
-Eric
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OK, a few more fixes.
Navigation via left- and right-arrow keys now works, and up-arrow takes you to the Gallery Index page.
I think the site is reasonably responsive now.
Images in galleries are a good bit bigger than in the index, but shrink if your window shrinks or you are using a small screen.
The newest change is that when a larger index image is showing, you can click either the gallery title or the image itself to go to the gallery.
Next order of business is to get an SSL certificate.
-Eric
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Looks pretty good but maybe a little dated. I've been down this road before and now I'm using Zenfolio which has it's drawbacks but it makes working on my site a whole lot faster and easier. And I'm a professional web developer.
For any site I maintain some kind of CMS (Content Management System) is a must. Even something built on top of WordPress is a lot more maintainable.
I do like the content but developing something like this from scratch and then maintaining it is not easy!
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Thanks for the comments, Matt.
Mine may look a bit dated or quaint, but the fun of it is getting some understanding of what goes on under the hood. It's a little like the satisfaction I get out of making my own prints instead sending them out to a lab.
And with my new system I can add a brand new gallery any time I want. With a bunch of files in a folder already sorted in the order I want to show them, I can make a new gallery and post it in under five minutes.
Cheers, Eric
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Thanks for the comments, Matt.
Mine may look a bit dated or quaint, but the fun of it is getting some understanding of what goes on under the hood. It's a little like the satisfaction I get out of making my own prints instead sending them out to a lab.
And with my new system I can add a brand new gallery any time I want. With a bunch of files in a folder already sorted in the order I want to show them, I can make a new gallery and post it in under five minutes.
Cheers, Eric
That's good that you are comfortable using it.
I can create a new gallery right from Lightroom...
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I can create a new gallery right from Lightroom...
In Lightroom 6 (non-subscription) I can't. ;)
It's time for me to get back to photography. Enough web-building (for now.)
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Especially for Jeremy:
I have added a "Quick Index" which requires fewer keystrokes to get to a gallery.
:)
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Eric, there's still what seems to me an unnecessary step in getting into a gallery. Clicking on a thumbnail in the galleries page should, I think, take you into the gallery; instead, it just gives a larger version of the thumbnail and another click is needed. Why?
Jeremy
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Jeremy,
Have you tried the "Quick Galleries" index? It lets you click on the gallery title just below each thumbnail to go to the gallery.
It's not very attractive, since the quick index shows the thumbnails in one long column.
To make both indexes and the galleries I have modified some of the gallery generators that come with BreezeBrowser. Each generator uses three templates, called index_template, thumbnail+template, and full_size_template. How it uses these to build it's galleries is somewhat of a mystery. I have been able to play with formatting (via CSS) and some of the workings (html), but I have left alone the fairly extensive Javascript so far. I think it's time for me to learn more about Javascript. Alternatively, I might just revert to one of their other generators for the Index and keep the slide show business for the galleries.
I will explore that a bit (and try to get more familiar with Javascript.)
As they say, Watch This Space! :)
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Have you tried the "Quick Galleries" index? It lets you click on the gallery title just below each thumbnail to go to the gallery.
It's not very attractive, since the quick index shows the thumbnails in one long column.
I hadn't, Eric, but now I have. As you say, it's unattractive; it's not clear why "galleries" should be different from "quick galleries"; and once in "quick galleries", it's really confusing that clicking on the gallery icon and clicking on the name have different effects.
The photos are great, but I can't warm to the site as a whole, I'm afraid.
Jeremy
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I hear you, Jeremy, and I do have some thoughts on how to replace both "galleries" and "quick index" with a single, responsive list of gallery thumbnails each of which is a direct link to the appropriate gallery. This will probably take a week or so, since I do need to spend some time on other things, but I will let you know when I get to it.
-Eric
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I agree that sounds like a UI improvement.
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OK, folks! I think I've got it. "Quick Index" has gone the way of the dodo.
The "Galleries" link now takes you to a list of thumbnails. Hovering over any thumbnail displays the name of the gallery associated with that thumbnail. Clicking on any thumbnail takes you to the associated gallery. No intermediate step required.
If people want, I can add the gallery name below each thumbnail as well.
I hope to add a new gallery or two soon.
-Eric
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I have now added the name of each gallery under each thumbnail in Galleries, and you just click on the thumbnail to visit the gallery.
I have also added one new gallery, "Trees."
Some galleries have captions under each image and others do not. I plan to add captions to the rest, one gallery at a time, but it will be slow, probably over a couple of months.
Right now I have an exhibit to prepare for, using real prints (remember those?) in frames, on a wall!
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I am just getting around to looking at your site in more detail. FWIW it seems to work fine in Edge. I noticed that when I am viewing your Iceland gallery the page title is "Italy 2006."
Lovely photos! And nicely designed site. Bravo!
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Thanks, Peter.
I had already discovered that Iceland glitch and corrected it.
If you clear your cache, or simply reload that page it should say Iceland 1974 instead of Italy 2006.