My first serious work in website design came about eight years ago when I was starting my photography business. Thanks to the Internet Archives I was able to piece together a stroll down memory lane to show a few of the incarnations of the site over the years.
One of the first deisgns circa 2002
The site started out with some pretty basic HTML laden with tables and gobs of javascript to create little tricks like image roll overs. That was my old dog Devo who quickly became the unwitting mascot of the websiste.
Another version circa 2004
The premise remained basically the same over the years but the design got a little cleaner and fancier as I learned my CSS chops. My need to continually update the site with images meant I needed to develop the site on a PHP platform and I decided on Pixelpost for my main platform and this is the software that still powers most of the site today.
Another version of the tabbed theme
My photography business site was built to both showcase my work and to serve as a gallery viewer and shopping cart system for photography clients. To create this I developed from the Coppermine Photo Gallery software. This platform allows me to do batch uploading and sorting of thousands of images, create and manage users, and have a nice shopping system for them to order prints. I released this theme to the community.. if you interested you can find out more here.
My template for Coppermine - this shows some of the admin menus
Well that was all fine and good but over the last year I have learned a lot more about PHP, CSS, and discovered jQuery so I can finally write javascript! My two year old design was already looking dusty to me so I gave it an overhaul. You can check out the new version live at folkphotography.com and here are a few screenshots of the new layout. I designed it on the Blueprint CSS framework for a solid, clean feel to the pages and used the Pixelpost open source platform to manage the images.
The backend of Pixelpost allows easy uploading, tagging, and commenting
My new layout dark, big, simple
Javascript keeps the user from having leave the page
Care was taken to make the site as friendly as possible for all types of users
Another example of hidden content revealed through javascript
Tag Clouds
Shopping cart system built on WordPress platform
To take care of a variety of my wishes the site uses a combination of three great management systems; WordPress, Coppermine, and Pixelpost to run the backend. Building on these platforms I developed original themes and scripts to create the functionality and features I wanted including a shopping cart system, comments on pictures, batch uploading of images, client databases, and auto-cropping to name a few.