Project: A Web Gallery

This project is all about creating a web gallery regardless of whether I want to physically create one at this stage, or just do some research about the sort of gallery I would like, and by looking at other photographers sites things that I might want to differently.

I have just set up a web gallery and although it is still very much in its infancy it has been interesting to get other peoples feedback on it.Http://pdphotography.zenfolio.com.

The feedback I have had so far has been encouraging, I  have asked family and friends to look at the site and let me know how easy it is to navigate, at the moment there appears to be no problems. The black surround has been well received particularly for black and white and the vintage work. I opted to have a series of thumb nails for views to easily locate a photograph they may want to view in more detail.

I had been thinking about setting up a gallery for some time I had the usual face book page and flickr accounts but wanted something a bit more professional. Originally I had been planning to use a word press site, but was advised by a fellow camera club member who also happened to be in computing to look at a couple of sites that are set up with photographers in mind. I looked at smugmug and zenfolio and decided to use zenfolio partly because it seemed fairly straight forward and also he used the same host so would be able to offer any help I needed getting things set up.

I started to look at other photographers websites including the one of the photographer who helped me with mine http://ibimages.zenfolio.com and realised that I wanted something that was easy for me to use, but also easy for people to navigate round without having too many steps to get to the pages they wanted to see.

I also looked at professional photographers working in the same location as me, partly because they may well be my competition in the future, therefore I wanted to see how their websites looked and how easy they were to navigate. I singled out two in particular.

 Melvin Sillcock is a Sittingbourne based photographer who covers a wide range of subjects including portraiture and baby photography the areas I am most interested in working in. I liked his site, I found it very easy to use, the background colours worked well with the photographs and it flowed well.www.melvinsillcockphotography.co.uk

The brown shades of the side panels compliment the earth tones in the photograph, this theme is reproduced through out the site, which also uses a slide show to show case his work.


The second photographer I chose is also Sittingbourne based but this time is a female photographer.
Joanne Collins again covers a variety of subjects. I found her site easy to use she had a bio on the first page which I found slightly off putting and would rather have seen more of her work with  the bio available as a page I could view if I wished to. I also found that although the site was easy to use it wasn't easy to view a good selection of her work sometimes I could only view one or two photographs. www.joannecollins.co.uk.

Above is a screen shot of Joanne's websites home page I just found it a bit too 'busy' with too much information on the home page.