Exercise 25: A web gallery

In this modern age all photographers have a website/web gallery to display and promote their art. With so much competition is it of the utmost importance that a web gallery is simple to navigate, uncluttered and displays the images at their optimum. Only the best should be shown, quality should win over quantity.

For this section my remit is to produce a web gallery to display my images and several other important aspects need to be taken into consideration, such as image size and sharpening. Large size images do have a bigger impact but can be slow to open.

So what I need to do is think about :

What is the purpose of my site?
Presenting my best work
Prioritise the images
Simple uncluttered design
Do I want to follow the trend or be different?
Make it searchable
Easy to navigate
Research designs

So only a small list then ;o)

My first port of call had to be what software to use, weebly seems to be a popular choice so that was my initial stopping point. Having explored weebly I think it will probably be simple enough for me to get my head around! I then had a good look at some of the web gallerys online.

Joel Meyerowitz Photography, LLC has a very simple first page, clean white uncluttered with a slideshow of images. Simple to navigate you always know where you are and how to find your way around the site.
Darcy Padilla Photography recently was a discussion point on the OCA forum, again white and very simple to look at.
http://www.joelsternfeld.com/ has one of the plainest first pages I have come across but it didn't seem to want to work for me? Again white.
Sam Abell: The Photographic Life This time grey but a very simple layout once more lots of "coming soons" on there which is a shame.
Michael Freeman Photography which has a black background.

After browsing for quite a while and taking note of website toolbars and headers and footers and widgets I decided to keep mine very simple indeed. The colour scheme is white and uses default fonts.I have an intro page and a page for each assignment. For the first assignment completed I chose to display what I considered to be the best six images. These pages then contain thumbnails and a slideshow set to autoplay.

Optimising the images for web use I resized them to 600 pixels for the largest side, resolution of 72, with Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction) selected, aiming for an average size of 30k.

I then used the Save for Web option selecting jpeg, medium,quality 30 and progressive. This should ensure an image that is large enough to display on the webpage but not take too long to upload.

Although I used Photoshop there are other plug-ins that you can download to resize images.

Web Resizer - Crop & Resize Images Free Online - Optimize images for websites and email

other useful sites -

Image Resizing for the Web and Email
Tutorial: Resize Photos for Web and Email Using Photoshop Elements

For copyright purpose I have altered the settings to block image downloads from the site.

As an experiment I saved Assignment 5 images with a quality of 60 to see if I could notice a difference in speed or quality. I think the speed is the same, maybe due to the very few images on the site and the quality seems a little sharper.
The link to my on line gallery is here JF Photography - OCA - Home