My New Photography Site.

September 19, 2008 7:18 PM

My New Photography Site.
After years of being on Flickr, I decided to make a real website. It gathers my best work over the past 6 years. It is also my first use of PHP, for simple templates. I'd appreciate critique on both the photography and the site design.
posted by scose (8 comments total)

It's simple, puts the photographs first and foremost, and doesn't use flash. I really like it. Kudos!
posted by potch at 11:31 PM on September 19, 2008

Congratulations on the site! A comment: I'd like to be able to advance to the next photo a bit more easily. The menu for this shifts with each photo (determined by the height of each image). I'd like this "mechanism" to be in the same place on each page and the link area to be bigger. Hope this helps.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 9:19 AM on September 20, 2008 [1 favorite]

I think it looks great! I did have the same issue as Taken Outtacontext where the location of the navigation shifts when browsing photos. Perhaps move it to the top so the size of the photo doesn't impact the placement?
posted by thejanna at 9:30 AM on September 22, 2008

Ditto the previous comments. I suggest setting aside a fixed-sized area for the photos, and putting the caption and navigation links outside that. Or putting them above, as thejanna suggests.

You might consider using a black background.
posted by adamrice at 1:42 PM on September 22, 2008

It looks like you're loading your photographs through a PHP script out of a database. This makes them appear to load pretty slowly (since you're buffering them through PHP after reading them out of the DB blob or file). Instead, just read them from a file.
posted by yellowbkpk at 6:04 PM on September 22, 2008

In the future, you might want to warn MeFites and sundry of NSFW (or borderline) material. I'm not offended, but I had to hastily click back to this tab when I clicked on "portraits" and Brillo Pad came up. That said, great title for that one. Love your journalism and snapshots, still looking at the rest. You seem to have a real knack for making that moment of connection with your subject - I feel like they're looking right at me.
posted by bettafish at 7:38 AM on September 23, 2008

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

I had the same issue with navigation. My intent was to keep the navigation as high up as possible, to avoid vertical scrolling. I guess it would make more sense to have the buttons on the side - that's how Flickr does it, and they've probably done more research on how to lay out a photo gallery than anyone else. I'll try a few changes to the style sheet.
posted by scose at 1:15 AM on September 24, 2008

I like the site, simple non-flash based photo sites are nice. I do have an odd-ball suggestion for navigation: Right now if you click on the image you are taken to the next image. What about if you click on the right half of the image you go forward and on the left half of the image you go backwards? Or instead of halves you could divide it into thirds, left third takes you back, right two-thirds takes you forward. None of this would be obvious or perhaps intuitive, but clicking anywhere on the image to advance is not really intuitive either -- maybe it is a link to download, maybe it takes you to the next image. No one likes image maps, but it is an idea. With flash it would be done with a hover menu, but the clean simplicity of having no indication appeals to me.
posted by ChrisHartley at 12:32 PM on October 16, 2008