Bird Test
My most recent site project is to create a page where I can showcase all my birding photos. Eventually, the page will include a title bar with links to maybe eight or ten pages that will appear below that bar when the links are clicked. Each page will hold ten to sixteen photos, 450 x 310 pixels (the standard size I use), each one of those being a clickable link to a 1000 x 800 pixel blowup. I did some preliminary work over the weekend.
Right now I’m just trying to design the basic page template, and decided to go with each picture “frame” being part of the background image, with a carefully measured table placing the photos and text accurately within each “frame.” It looks OK on my computers and with the browsers I use, but I wanted to ask others if it looks OK on yours. If you’d like to help, please visit the test page (if you are reading this past November 2005, the page has been completed) and tell me if the images and the text below them all appear nicely within the frames. Please keep in mind that the blowups are not yet available–this is just a test of the basic page graphics alignment.
By the way, the page I’m making is not designed downward for people with monitor resolution less than 1000 pixels wide; I figure that’s out of date enough, and I don’t want to resize all my photos for a minority of viewers–for them, the page will simply scroll offscreen to the right a bit.
My own results show the page rendered fine in Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari on a Mac, and Mozilla, Firefox, and Internet Explorer on Windows XP. At first, all but IE were fine, with Explorer showing the photos out of frame; it turns out that Explorer alone of all the browsers I tested has a unique default page margin setting (Explorer’s different from the rest, surprise!), but by setting the BODY command attributes “TOPMARGIN” and “LEFTMARGIN” to 8 pixels each, it seems to fix IE, and the other browsers are compatible.
But I would like to know if any of your results differ from those above, for the better or for the worse. Just leave a comment below and let me know how things look screwy. Thanks!
Nice work. It looks impressive and works fine with IE.
Tahnks, and to Quinlan from the last entry. Keep ’em coming, I want to make sure that the page reads well to everyone before I put the greater effort into constructing it…
If the page is narrower than 2 picture widths the right border is obscured, tested in opera, safari and firefox.
Why not just install http://gallery.menalto.com/ ?
Too bad I forgot to mention the Japan Bird Festival 2005 to you, which took place in Abiko last weekend. Link http://www.birdfesta.net/
How are you going to organise the photos?
By trip?
By bird species?
By location?
By species, though not by ornithological categorization. Look at the test page again (re-load, if necessary) to see the latest update.
Okay, the test page is revised–but still deeply under construction. However, you can get a much better idea what the final look will be. I’ve created frames, with a title/link bar at the top, and the display pages changing below. The links to the different photo pages are just below the title graphic, beginning with “Egrets, Herons, and Geese,” followed by “Ducks,” and then others. Right now only the first two links work, and they lead to dummy fill-in pages, but they are a bit different, so you can see that they change when you click the links
I don’t think blue links or even just underlines would look good with all the links being text and all so close together. Therefore, I used a very short css stylesheet to de-underline the links. The link color is black, and the visited-link color is gray. The down side: they don’t look like links. The up side: I think people will figure it out and click on them anyway.
The category titles are a problem: too many types, too little room. Do you think you could understand where to find certain birds from the categories given? Is the text acceptable, or way too small? What do you think in general?
Now that I think of it, I’ll probably add a “favorites” bottom-page which will load when the gallery is first accessed.
Dirk:
Ah, well. There’s always next year.
As for the gallery software, I prefer to personalize wherever I can… and this way I finally got around to learning at least a bit more about CSS. And I think I can tweak the exact style and look better.