The new grafphoto.com
Hi folks,
Long time no post eh? Lo siento mi amigos. The past month has had me swamped with a lot of things, and unfortunately my blog suffered for it. I should be able to get back into the swing of things pretty soon.
One thing that has kept me busy is that I have been nearing the home stretch on a website redesign I have been working on “in my spare time” for months. Something always seemed to come up that blocked my momentum in finally getting it done. I must have changed my mind a dozen times or so before finally settling on what I have now. I gave a preview to Facebook fans awhile ago, but it wasn’t live. That is now changed. So I welcome you to take a look and let me know what you think.
Nature and Wildlife Photography by Mark Graf | Grafphoto.com
Developing this new site has had a lot of ups and downs, frustrations and insights. Over the next couple of posts, I will provide some details of those experiences that hopefully will help anyone looking to take on this adventure for themselves.
One of the first things you ask yourself when contemplating a website redesign is … Why change? If you have something that is working pretty good, don’t fix what isn’t broken! Well, probably like most artists, you get tired of looking at the same piece of work after awhile and just want to throw it in the trashcan. I think my last major redesign was back in 2004, so a refresh is long overdue. There were also a lot of aspects of my old site that I didn’t like…
- Splash page – although I provided navigation to the main areas of the site from the initial page, there wasn’t a lot else there except text and my Flash based rotating circle thingy. I wanted to provide a bit more image content on the first page (hence the slideshow), provide direct access to other image content and hopefully make it a bit more engaging to encourage click-throughs.
- Flash – although I had very little Flash on my site, mostly in the rotating circle thingy and in some page headers, I believe Flash is going away. If you haven’t been following the Adobe/Apple Flash saga, just know that Apple’s mobile devices (iPhone/iPad) do not support it. No matter what company you side with or don’t side with, the fact is there are a heck of a lot of these things floating around now. The iPad can’t stay on the shelves, and more people are going to be browsing with these things. I didn’t want sections of my site showing up like little Lego cubes.
- Scalability – The menus and navigation on pages outside my gallery were not very flexible. A lot of my site was table based and a jumble of CSS and page specific styling. Much of that has been redone with site wide CSS. I can now add any items or content to my menus with relative ease. I can also add text content to my front page in the expanding containers without disrupting the overall aesthetics.
- Fresh look – The slide show on the front page starts with a random image, and the quotes I have placed below it are also randomly generated. The page will have constantly rotating content for a fresher appearance on each visit.
The biggest headache, and any website designer will likely agree, is trying to make the content look the same across the continuously growing number of browsers out there. You would think by now they would be standardized, but far from it. Microsoft Internet Explorer has become my arch nemesis.
Unfortunately, you have to contend with IE and its many, many quirks and inconsistencies. Just the last month shows that 55% of visitors to my site are using IE. Within that 55% ; 54% using IE8, 29% using IE7, and 16% using IE6, the rest on lower versions. Well, the lower versions are out of luck, it is hard enough contending with the 3 versions! For one of the most popular browsers out there for users, it is one of the biggest pains in the $%*# for a designer. You folks still using IE6 and lower ought to upgrade because that thing is filled with more security holes than swiss cheese.
Most of the time I could get Safari and Firefox to look just fine, but then because IE has to go off make something look completely screwy. Google Chrome is generally OK, but I am convinced there is a bug in color profiles because some page elements are darker than others (at least on a Mac). These days, you also cannot forget mobile devices. Apple’s iPhones and iPads have their own peculiar traits when interpreting web content also. I’ll get more into those in a followup post. As far as the other obscure browsers, Opera, Camino, Sea Monkey, etc, etc – well – I apologize to you folks if something looks out of wack, all of these others tired me out.
It isn’t 100% perfect yet, there are a few minor formatting issues that I will eventually clean up, but it is close enough to encourage folks to kick the tires a bit. I welcome your thoughts, reactions, comments. Thanks for visiting.
Very nice re-design I must say, I am web designer myself and the hardest thing is to re design your own website, and yes I hate IE 6 I hope it die soon, great work
Thanks Marios
The site looks great! Clean, pretty, and easy to navigate 🙂
Thanks a lot Amber.
thanks very much, I am obliged to say your website is brilliant!
Looks great Mark. Your site looks very classy.
Thank you Richard.
Beautiful layout Mark. I especially like the javascript sections at the bottom. Are you going to update your blog to match too? It looks very professional and the darkish grey really makes your photo slider stand out.
I’m currently working on a new website too. It takes ages to decide what you want then ages to implement it. I guess considering you’re using project 7 then you’re also using Dreamweaver? I’m using notepad++ so its taking even longer. Did you make all your own logos etc? That’s what is taking the time for me since I’m not very good at photoshop. Luckily I’m going for a pixel-cartoony look because that is totally in line with my skill level! 😉 I’m trying to make myself a custom wordpress theme with php, javascript & CSS so I can use wordpress to control my content. Unfortunately that means learning html, php, javascripts and css – oh well we’ve got to aim high!
Thanks Suzy. No plans to update the blog. It looks “close enough” for me right now. The tree background is the same image I use in the mastheads. I am not up to designing a new theme, except maybe to change some colors eventually.
I did design all of my own logos and other graphics on the site using Photoshop, and site design in Dreamweaver. Good luck on your redesign – I can’t even imagine doing it all by code alone!
Thanks Mark. At over £400 i just cant justify Dreamweaver (as much as I’d like to), notepad++ is free and colours in all the important bits so you can see what you are doing and the inspect element function on opera browser (or firebug extension for Firefox) are also free and allow me to see where all my code edges are. They allow me to see other peoples sites and see how all the magic happening (although disappointingly like revealing the answers behind a magicians trick)! You can get wordpress to run locally by using some free software which gives you full access to poke about in the database and find out how it all works (which means I don’t have to run the work in progress pages online which is very handy). I can mock up in photoshop layers to a certain extent. Also, anything I get stuck on there is always my old friends google and the w3schools.com. Most of the plugins for wordpress are open source (free) so I’ve modified NextGen gallery plugin and thickbox javascript to do what I want so hopefully in a little while I’ll have a full site up and running. I figure if I can DIY it in a few months then it will be easier to adapt and maintain after that.
I think it looks great and also agree with the navigation. I also like the galleries page and how well you categorized them. I was quite impressed with the speed pages loaded. May I ask what you are using for the slideshow if not using Flash?
Thanks Monte. My gallery hasn’t really changed – I just made the rest of the site more similar in appearance. Glad to read they are loading quickly.
I use ProjectSeven’s Image Rotator Magic for the slideshow (which is a Dreamweaver extension).
Dude, ……. excellent!
Your site is a prime example of what you get with a bit of patience and know how.
Very professional, … and beautiful!!
Mike
Mike –
I wish I could claim patience and know-how. It really seemed more like persistence and willingness for a lot of trial and error! 🙂 Can’t tell you how many times I was willing to just scrap the whole thing. Thanks though!!
Mark, your new site is impressive, even if it’s not 100% perfect. 🙂
I’m impressed with the use of CSS and the avoidance of Flash. No one should count on Apple changing it’s opinion of Flash and to be honest I’d like to see HTML5 adopted to the point where Flash isn’t needed.
I agree with Consuelo, the new site is easy to navigate and it has a more consistent look and feel to it.
Nice job and a heck of a lot of work!
Thanks Earl. I would be willing to bet that Flash isn’t going to be used much in about 2 years, maybe sooner. Apple really got the momentum going.
Hi Mark, I really like your new website. It’s laid out really well and really easy to get around. Your photos are absolutely amazing too. It’s definitely an eye catcher.
Thank you Consuelo. I like that you found it easy to navigate.
Hey Mark
I like the new layout. Nice work.
Is the slideshow you installed on the homepage not a Flash thing? I worry about Flash too, with the new iPads. I don’t have much on my site, just a few small things, but they won’t work at all on the iPad, which is a pain. I think it’s kinda lame of Apple to not support Flash at all, because SO many websites incorporate flash, to some degree. I don’t like that kind of enforced thing at all.
I hear you on the browser issues. I pretty much gave up on IE and just said to hell with it.
Cheers
Carl
Hey Carl – Thanks, and nope, no Flash – it is done with CSS and javascript from folks over at ProjectSeven.
Fact is, not many, if any, mobile devices right now support Flash very well. Apple claims it is a real battery hog for a CPU to accommodate it. I suppose they are taking a stand and a bit of a gamble. Adobe is supposedly releasing something for Android soon, so I guess when they prove it can be good, maybe Apple will get more pressure.