About this site (throughout the site, please hover over the bold words for more information)
The approach I have adopted in building this site is to keep it simple. Surely a site devoted to photography should focus on the images themselves and not flashy design and graphics which just take an age to download. In order to help download times, I have attempted to format the entire site using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which has reduced the amount of code dramatically.
With smaller page sizes provided by CSS, I decided to use slightly largerThe full jpegs (not the thumbnails) in this site are sized at 40k. jpegs. I have visited so many photography sites where the jpegs are of such poor quality that the viewer has little idea of what the printed image may look like. As I am in the business of selling prints, this was not an option for me.
The heart of the site is based around the Search engine, which enables the visitor to look for images that fit his/her own criteria. The code around the search engine is written in Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) and uses a Microsoft Access database. The images are split in to 3 types - Large Format (5X4), Go directly to the gallery of Large Format images Digital Go directly to the gallery of digital images and Infrared.Go directly to the gallery of infrared images These can be searched individually or all together. All images of a particular image type There are 3 image types - 5X4 Digital and Infrared can be viewed without using the search engine - via the image type pages. To help with navigation I have incorporated the "hints" This is an example of a "hint" box at the top of the page. As you hover over certain elements, more information about what to expect is displayed. The site is designed to be viewed at a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or larger. Smaller screen sizes will require scrolling.
The adoption of pure CSS for formatting will unfortunately give problems to visitors with older browsers where CSS support may be limited. I have fully tested the site in the following browsers and although there are a few differences between browsers, hopefully they aren't significant. If you have an older version, you may experience formatting that doesn't mirror my design.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5 (IE5) and 6 (IE6)
- Netscape Navigator version 7
- Mozilla version 1.7.2 and Firefox version 1.0
This design is a development of a site I put together for my good friend Clive Minnitt (see links) and represents my initial attempt at publishing my work on the web. It will be continually updated with new images and design improvements as they become available. If you have any thoughts, comments or ideas, please get in touch via the contact page - I would appreciate any feedback you feel able to give.