Ex. 25 A web gallery

I have maintained a personal web site for some time, www.heidi-and-shaun.com, using this as a vehicle to share my photography and our experiences of diving.  This web site was built from the ground up using web development tools and hosted via a normal web hosting company:

As can be seen the site was carefully structured around a number of themes and galleries.  I used Photoshop to create the galleries and linked the whole thing together using a series of master pages.  The challenge was that the site was difficult to edit and hence I lost enthusiasm to maintain it.  Since then the site has elapsed and we no longer have the URL.

For this course I decided to take advantage of a commercial hosting site that directly supported the creation of web photo galleries. I used clicpic and subscribed to a two year middle sized package with the following URL

http://www.redcatphoto.com/

Using clicpic has reduced the amount of work needed to create and manage the site, although it does have its issues, the editing functionality is primitive and assumes significant knowledge of the web.  In any case here is my top page:

In building this site I wanted to greatly simplify what I had done before, selecting a small number of themes, essentially Underwater Imagery and Photos from my home city of Munich.  Within each of these categories I have decided to limit the number of galleries and theme them by subject type, rather than by trip or location.  What this does for me is to create a flexible vehicle to present my best images, without being tied to when or where they were taken:

Munich
  Buildings
  Experiences
  People
  Places
  Hofgarten - one off gallery with the images from Assignment 3 in this course

Underwater
  Portraits
  Precious
  Jewels
  Big Stuff
  Myriads
  Forms
  Predators
  Shells
  Vistas

In the case of the underwater stuff I am trying to be a little cryptic, but also to enable a grouping by image type, the purpose being to create harmonious groups of images.  I am still thinking about this as it may prove a little confusing, but heck it's my site.

Within each of these galleries I plan for no more than 24 photos and will continually add and remove as my portfolio improves.  The images on the site are not huge, maximum of 600 pixels wide, this is to reduce loading times, but also avoid theft as the images are too small to have a great deal of value.

Navigation is simple, there are only 3 levels on the site and it is always possible to link back to the home page, again a process much simplified by use of pre-existing templates.

The proof here is in the eating and I invite you to explore the site and see what I have done.

Finally the Red Cat is D'oro our tiny ginger cat, who keeps us honest and amused.