Comments on: My New Photography Site.

My New Photography Site.

scose — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:18:58 -0800

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.

By: potch

potch — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 23:31:53 -0800

It's simple, puts the photographs first and foremost, and doesn't use flash. I really like it. Kudos!

By: Taken Outtacontext

Taken Outtacontext — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 09:19:30 -0800

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.

By: thejanna

thejanna — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:30:04 -0800

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?

By: adamrice

adamrice — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:42:07 -0800

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.

By: yellowbkpk

yellowbkpk — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:04:39 -0800

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.

By: bettafish

bettafish — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:38:24 -0800

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.

By: scose

scose — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:15:04 -0800

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.

By: Chrishartley

Chrishartley — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:32:53 -0800

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.