Photography on the Web and Web Stuff.

Apart from photography I enjoy web design (see my Dreamweaver Template packages). I designed this website and my goal was to create something visually pleasing and easy to navigate. This is not a tutorial on how to build a website to display your photographs, it's just a few pointers that might help you with your quest in building a photography website, or any other website in some ways. First thing is to keep things simple, this will not only help you build a website without major headaches and problems but will also be beneficial to the end user. Whatever you do don't go fancy and use anything that moves around the page, this is pointless and annoying. The first thing somebody does when they find a website confusing is what? They hit the back button and are gone forever.

Creating a Visually Appealing Photography Website.

Lets be perfectly clear here, the WWW is awash with websites that are just annoyingly unattractive. A successful website not only needs interesting content but should also be visually pleasing. This is very important especially as you are displaying a form of art (photography).

Standards.

This websites page design is controlled by CSS. CSS is a way of keeping the 'design' of your site separate from the content. Nearly every HTML tag has attributes that can be controlled by CSS. It also complies to W3C standards.

Software I use.

I use Dreamweaver for HTML and CSS, Photoshop for images and Fireworks for web graphics such as the layout of this site. All these products can be found at www.adobe.com. All of these programs are very powerful tools and will take time to learn. You will never conquer any of them but you will be able to grasp the basics to build a simple yet effective website quickly.

Some Photography Add-ons.

On this site I have used two add-ons, FlashSlide show Pro and Lightbox JS. I would recommend these products for there overall look, simplicity to implement and a great way to display your photographs on the WWW.

Colour Scheme.

This ColorImpact is highly recommended and also Adobe have Kuler.

Conclusion.

A website should be accessible (cross browser-platform friendly and built to standards), attractive yet simple in design, easy to navigate and contain sufficient content. It's not rocket science. This website has a very simple interface and follows the following criteria:

* Web Standards Compliant
* Major Browsers Compatibility
* Valid X/HTML CSS
* Good Design
* Compact Interface

So the conclusion is basic, be basic and don't confuse yourself or the end user.