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Author Topic: Squarespace for photographers  (Read 30027 times)

Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #20 on: January 09, 2011, 09:07:13 am »

By "rest of the world" you certainly mean "me."

His site is quite good and displays the (very good) images nicely.

That was not my point, there are 1,000,001 other sites that do it just as well, this one is no different although I still find the large areas of white distracting and the images are not as distinct from the background as they could be. But this depends a lot upon your browser/screen/OS combination.
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #21 on: January 09, 2011, 09:43:07 am »

Looks fine on my iPad, though same height problems.

I've been looking at different solutions for my next site redesign. One option is Joomla and I took a look at their Community Photography Showcase here:

http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/arts/photography.html

You just have to look through the first half dozen sites to understand what works and what doesn't.

Cheers,

The trouble with this sort of beauty parade is we are not in a position to know the context in which the site is being viewed. I am not, and never have been, an excited bride to be so how can I judge whether the wedding photo site actually works or not? The one shown in this selection does not strike me as being amongst the clearest or best out there but if the creator thinks it's grand then we cannot argue, indeed any sort of adverse or critical comment is discouraged by the ethos that emanates from the content of the Joomla community home page.

It there is one common problem to all these sites it is they seem shy of actually stating where they are based. I could get very excited about a fellows work and then find that they operate on a different continent so feel a little annoyed that I've wasted time and effort with their site, to my mind that is a fail. Perhaps they are of the mind that because it is a 'global' community their work knows no borders, maybe, but I ain't paying travel expenses from South Africa. True, it is good to see work from around the world but if I was a potential client simply seeking a good level of competence then my minutes were unproductively employed.

Anyway, my original argument still applies and that is lack of distinction or individuality. There is a satirical magazine in the UK called Private Eye and in the run up to Christmas they ran a series of pictures showing the covers of novels published last year. In each picture there was a tall dark stranger in raincoat walking away from the viewer, the background or setting may have been different but the picture was basically the same in all of them which was probably about a dozen, and I get the very same feeling of deja vu when looking at the list of sites on the Joomla community page.







« Last Edit: January 09, 2011, 09:47:15 am by Justinr »
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elliot_n

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #22 on: January 09, 2011, 02:15:55 pm »

Anyway, here is one that I did last year and am presently updating, It has a style which I believe matches the cause and I've tried to include as many images as I can- www.tipprally.com There aren't many like it, which some may consider a good thing!

There aren't many sites like that now, but they were everywhere 15 years ago.
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tom b

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #23 on: January 09, 2011, 03:18:32 pm »

Just a thought…

Easy to use
Flexible
W3C compliant
Requires little training
Not reliant on a web administrator
Inexpensive
Community help
Large developer base

Who would want to use these systems?

Cheers,
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Tom Brown

Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #24 on: January 09, 2011, 04:32:36 pm »

Just a thought…

Easy to use
Flexible
W3C compliant
Requires little training
Not reliant on a web administrator
Inexpensive
Community help
Large developer base

Who would want to use these systems?

Cheers,


Well not me for a start Tom.

I seriously looked at developing my CMS abilities last year mainly because I was asked about a site where the customer could do their own regular updates and to be honest I found Wordpress simply confusing and Drupal I couldn't get to install. The 'help' communities were simply not that helpful ( I wasn't the only one having installation problems with Drupal) and I got  bored trawling through the various templates in WP. It would be easier, I decided, to stick to an HTML editor. I do have WP embedded in a couple of sites for news blogs and I use Coppermine for galleries but at the end of the day I really can not see them being as anywhere near flexible as a clean sheet of paper and a smattering of HTML. I use MS Expression Web and there is a very knowledgeable if at times a little aloof help forum and because the software is not open source MS have a vested interest in getting it right, not that they always do of course.

The other problem with CMS is that people rush into doing their own sites then lose interest or get busy elsewhere. You said yourself that few finished your course and that is a situation that is repeated throughout my (our?) level of the web site building world. If it is a business then even with CMS they will still need to appoint someone to keep it up to date, a web administrator in fact.

There is also an argument that W3C are too darn prescriptive, socialist even, and they see only the development of code and not the web itself. Just whose web is it anyway?
« Last Edit: January 09, 2011, 05:17:20 pm by Justinr »
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #25 on: January 09, 2011, 04:34:14 pm »

There aren't many sites like that now, but they were everywhere 15 years ago.

Excellent!! It's worked!

Have you noticed what the site is all about?
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elliot_n

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #26 on: January 09, 2011, 04:48:09 pm »

Excellent!! It's worked!

Have you noticed what the site is all about?

No, I didn't get that far.

For a CMS, I'm a fan of indexhibit. Fully customisable with basic CSS knowledge. Helpful forum. Geared towards artists.
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #27 on: January 09, 2011, 05:06:21 pm »

No, I didn't get that far.

For a CMS, I'm a fan of indexhibit. Fully customisable with basic CSS knowledge. Helpful forum. Geared towards artists.

Errr.... How far did you get? It's splashed all the way across the home page.

Not heard of Indexhibit, I'll take a look.
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #28 on: January 09, 2011, 05:30:27 pm »

Well I took a look as promised and entered a dozen or so sites and my overall impression was of having various bits of art shoved under my nose with very little effort to explain who, where, what and why. Trawl through yourself Eliot and tell me that as a collection of websites they are shining examples of how to communicate.

The collection highlights the very problem with CMS that I mentioned before, people rush into it thinking the web is their oyster then find that they don't really understand it after all, are not really as interested as they thought, it's perhaps harder work than they imagined and so on. I'm sure there are some excellent sites there but to me they all looked a bit unfinished. Not the fault of the software itself I know, but perhaps a little too much is promised by its proponents.
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elliot_n

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #29 on: January 09, 2011, 07:33:34 pm »

Here's a good example of Indexhibit in action:

Fraction Magazine

Shoving art under peoples' noses is what Indexhibit does best.

For me, Livebooks is too flashy, Wordpress is too complicated.

Doing all updates manually in Dreamweaver is too tedious.
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tom b

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #30 on: January 09, 2011, 07:59:35 pm »

Interestingly, you mention LiveBooks being too flashy. Just previously I visited the liveBooks website using my iPad. I went to the Client Examples page and visited two sites that I had seen previously on my Mac (both Flash). Both sites opened with mobile versions of the sites. It seems that they have been doing their homework.

I still like the LiveBooks gestalt. Everything happens in the one rectangle, it's nice and clean and simple.

What I am looking for is a non Flash method of doing the same thing. Joomla seems to have some promise in this which is why I pointed out the Joomla examples previously.

Anyway a bit more research is in order. If anyone knows a good Joomla gallery that gives slideshows, and other methods of navigation (keystrokes, thumbnails etc) I would like know about it.

Cheers,

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Tom Brown

Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #31 on: January 10, 2011, 04:50:55 am »

Here's a good example of Indexhibit in action:

Fraction Magazine

Shoving art under peoples' noses is what Indexhibit does best.

For me, Livebooks is too flashy, Wordpress is too complicated.

Doing all updates manually in Dreamweaver is too tedious.


Agreed, art can often work well if it is unexpected, not sure whether this translates well to the web though where the viewer may be seeking the unexpected. There is some nice and imaginative work amongst the Indexhibit sites and as a catalogue of such enterprise it's could be quite good but as stand alone sites I'm not so sure.

Had a look at Livebooks and have to agree once more, as soon as I see the flash loading symbol I'm off elsewhere. I have done two sites which the customer wanted converted from flash to HTML.

Yep, Wordpress is not the all round hippy huggy panacea that its fans would have us believe. I wanted to put two distinct blogs on the same site and asked how this could be done on the help forum. Not one reply, so either it couldn't be done or nobody knew or because it wasn't an esoteric question about the use of an inverted jellyfish tag or somesuch nobody really cared.

I've never used Dreamweaver, only MS Expression Web which is available at a fraction of the cost and once you get the hang of a few principles it is not that slow or difficult. I use tables rather than full on CSS and it really can be quick and easy if you are familiar with using MS Excel and Word, which is why a lot of web designers hate them, tables let cowboys like me undermine the authority of the web priesthood, just like CMS! Whilst on the subject of WP v. HTML I had a site where results in tabular form were required to be put up after each race fixture. There was no sensible way of doing it in WP but with an HTML site I just save the Excel files as web pages, upload to the server and pop a link on to the appropriate page. Five minutes work at the most.
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elliot_n

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #32 on: January 10, 2011, 05:47:24 am »

To the original poster. That you created the site in 2 hours is impressive, but I don't think it shows your work (which I like a lot) in the best light. Having to navigate the thumbnails with the mouse is distracting. As is the typography of the menu. Your logo looks good.
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simplify

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #33 on: January 10, 2011, 04:27:25 pm »

Thanks for the advice Elliot.

Justin, your sites look prehistoric and if I ever went to a business site that looked like that I would immediately write them off.  It looks like they were designed in 1994 and never updated.  For someone with such a strong opinion on webdesign.. not impressive at all.
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #34 on: January 10, 2011, 05:25:06 pm »

Thanks for the advice Elliot.

Justin, your sites look prehistoric and if I ever went to a business site that looked like that I would immediately write them off.  It looks like they were designed in 1994 and never updated.  For someone with such a strong opinion on webdesign.. not impressive at all.

Funny thing is though that they work.

Tippspeedway 6,000 true visitors in first  3 months (not to be confused with hits)

The tipprally.com site is actually meant to invoke past times, so once again you prove it works, thank you. Oh, and I've just been asked to do another one similar to it.

cattlelattin Very simple and basic, and deliberately so but by heck he sells his cattle a lot quicker now that he has it. (not my photos of cattle on it BTW)

And perhaps the most successful site in Ireland - donedeal Not mine I hasten to add, just wish it was. No bells, no whistles, no stars or feedbacks or other gadgetry just honest 'postcard in the window' selling. Ebay gets nowhere close over here.

If you really think that this constant white sterility we see in websites from Flickr to Facebook via just about half the sites that come on stream is little more than lazy design based on fashion rather than function then perhaps you should think again. No, actually, there may be a point in it. LCD screens in my experience tend to be far brighter than CRT's and so can completely wash out any subtleties in shading and colour, so we are left with the lowest common denominator. White, or maybe black. Good old technology, taking us back to the monochrome days eh!

If your site impresses those who you wish to impress then it's working and I'm happy for you. Mine are actually out there doing a job instead.


« Last Edit: January 10, 2011, 05:35:12 pm by Justinr »
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jeremypayne

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #35 on: January 10, 2011, 05:31:24 pm »

If you really think that this constant white sterility we see in websites from Flickr to Facebook via just about half the sites that come on stream is little more than lazy design based on fashion rather than function then perhaps you should think again. No, actually, there may be a point in it. LCD screens in my experience tend to be far brighter than CRT's and so can completely wash out any subtleties in shading and colour, so we are left with the lowest common denominator. White, or maybe black. Good old technology, taking us back to the monochrome days eh!

Guess you don't know who Edward Tufte is, huh?
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #36 on: January 10, 2011, 05:38:26 pm »

Doubtless there are all sorts of people I should know but life is awfully short.

I'll look him up.

Cheers.
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #37 on: January 10, 2011, 08:18:36 pm »

Guess you don't know who Edward Tufte is, huh?

;D
I'd like to hire Tufte to redesign my website!

Eric
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Justinr

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #38 on: January 11, 2011, 09:51:26 am »

;D
I'd like to hire Tufte to redesign my website!

Eric

Dunno about that - www.edwardtufte.com. It's a bit err... all over the place. 
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Eric Myrvaagnes

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Re: Squarespace for photographers
« Reply #39 on: January 11, 2011, 11:12:06 am »

Dunno about that - www.edwardtufte.com. It's a bit err... all over the place. 
I haven't checked it out yet, but I bet it's pretty wild, and NOT your usual run-of-the-mill website.

Eric
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