I’ve now officially opened up my revised photo website and started letting folks know. What follows is a summary of what’s been changed.
First, I’ve made a few cosmetic changes to the way the site looks.
– The vertical menu bar background has been dimmed so that it doesn’t obscure as much of the image on the home page as it used to.
– The home page image still changes each time you visit it but the library it uses only includes selections of my most recent photos.
– Photo galleries are now presented in a much more compact matrix of square thumbnails providing a quick overview of the gallery’s content. Clicking on any image presents it in a full-window size (called the ‘lightbox’ view). Navigation to other photos in the same gallery can be accomplished by using the on-screen or keyboard arrows (or by using the browser’s back arrow to return to the gallery summary screen). Hovering the mouse at the bottom of the full-window view reveals more information about the image. Alternatively, one can press the slideshow button and just watch the presentation.
– The exception to the above is for any panoramic photo gallery; that view provides thumbnails of the entire photo (the small squares just can’t do justice to a panorama image).
The more substantive changes are represented by an expanded set of menu choices:
– It now includes a What’s New choice which will links to a gallery of only the most recent photos.
– The old Photos menu choice has been replaced by two new ones. One of those is Places which has sub-menu choices connecting to specific country pages. The other is Special Subjects which also has sub-menu choices linking to subject-oriented galleries (currently Sunrise, Sunset, Panorama, Black & White, and National Parks).
– Search is still a menu choice but now offers three ways to search the entire collection (check it out – it might surprise you).
– Blog is a new menu choice. I will only write to this page when I’ve got something to say (definitely not every day!). Each entry provides space for feedback or questions.
– The About item is still there and still has two sub-menu choices; About Me and About This Site. The About Me is mostly unchanged but the About This Site has been expanded to include what used to be site-oriented tutorial items. In particular it explains how to obtain FREE digital copies of photos and how to buy prints (should you want to hang a photo on a wall or give it as a gift). It also provides an abbreviated version of the site’s organization.
– The Contact Me choice is still available and unchanged from version 1.
The other substantive change has to do with the photo collection itself.
The entire site has been re-organized to support smaller sub-divisions of previous galleries. Instead of a gallery representing all of Italy, for example, the site now divides Italy into regions so that no gallery has an overwhelming number of photos to exhibit.
This is true for each country represented on the site. The United States is divided into States (or groups of states when the number of images included is small). In the case of California (my home state), photos are subdivided into regions within the state. Moreover, the website is now organized to allow me to further subdivide any gallery into smaller ‘chunks’ as needed (as additional photographs are added) to keep gallery sizes reasonable.
Revising this site turned out to be way more work than I expected. But I’m very pleased with the result. I hope you enjoy exploring it.
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