Gallery Design

"Showing off my pics"

A lot of sites today have a gallery of some sort showing off their work. Designers have portfolios, builders have projects, realtors have featured properties. The one thing they all have in common is the fact they have pictures to display but difficulty knowing how to display them.

"Ways to display"

The most popular way to display photos is the checkerboard method. This is simply a row of thumbnail photos lined horizontally and vertically. These photos can be clickable (to make the photo larger) and/or have a brief description or name under it. This is a static gallery.

Dynamic galleries fall into a few different styles. One is created with the use of a database, and server/client pages. The user would have an interface that would allow them to add photos via an admin section and set all the parameters such as size, description, keywords (if search is used), categories, etc. The client page would pull the information stored in the database and format it for the viewer within the web template. Pretty cool huh? These galleries are usually created as a software package that is bundled with a ton of features for the user who needs many categories and has a lot of photos to display.

Another cool dynamic gallery gaining popularity is flash galleries. Flash galleries have been around for a long time, but since flash is becoming a standard for browsers, Adobe stepped up to the plate and added ActionScript3 to it's Flash software. AS3 now allows unbelievable 3D and smooth effects that were not available in earlier versions.

Wait there's more! Flash galleries supporting XML (Extensible Markup Language) are becoming the next generation of flash. This allows the stage and actions to be made in flash, but the data is pulled not from a database, but from an XML file. These XML files can be created by the developer and updated by the client so the client doesn't even have to know flash. An example of this is our Portfolio page. These galleries can support larger galleries with categories as well.

"I hear search engines don't like flash"

It is true that at the moment flash is not well read by the search engines, but this will someday change. To those who use this argument, there's a solution. You can have your cake and eat it too by designing two galleries. Create the pretty flash gallery for your viewers and a NON-FLASH VERSION for your non-flash viewers and search engines. Simple wasn't it?

"I'm a point and clicker. Is my job done?"

Aside from the gallery creation, stuffing photos in a gallery isn't the only job. The photos should be resized for the project (just like the traditional style as well) and possibly image manipulation (fixing color, shadows, etc.). Most users do not know how to manipulate an image leaving the image in a raw state that may not look good for the web. We have the tools and knowledge to help get those raw images into a web optimized state for your viewers. We also have photographers on staff who can take those important photos for you either from the air or on the ground.

If you have a project that is in need of quality imagery or you may already have the photos and need a great gallery solution, give us a call today and let us handle all your imaging and gallery needs.

Back to top | Back to services