Your thoughts on photo gallery website design for open source template

[Free]

Howdy All,

I've just started building a portfolio website template for my favourite Content Management System (MODx) that I plan to release to the open source community when finished.

Being a project for myself/a buddy, not a proper client I skipped most of the planning, I just scribbled out how I wanted the pages with the photos on to look and jumped into the fun part. I've got the actual gallery pages themselves looking good, but now realised it needs a front page to get to the gallery pages. I've made something up that fits in with my original plan for the gallery page, just not sure how it's going to work as a front page???

It's a lot of effort to port the unfinished template onto a live server so I can only show some screen shots at the moment.

Firstly is, the gallery page as I planned it...



I wanted the thumbnails down the left so users can quick jump to any photo they like on the page, then the photo and description on the right. Nice and easy!

So I got that fully functioning and then did the following to the home page...



Any thoughts on the layout would be greatly appreciated, especially the front page. Do you like the big text block (you can put images in there) to let you give your spiel (and help SEO) or do you just want to jump right into the images with no intro? Am I missing something that should be there? What do you think?

I still have a bit of graphic design to incorporate, gradients, texture and the like as well as a banner image, but this is a reasonably close representation of the final product.

The other thing I realised after looking at some of your websites is that I'll probably need to incorporate the option of multiple galleries, eg landscape, portrait, sports etc to make browsing the users preferred images easier.

I am building the prototype for a mate to use for his underwater photos so his needs are my first priority at the start, however as soon as that is up and running I'll be tweaking it and giving it free to use for the general photographic/artistic community so please any feedback or ideas for what you would want in a portfolio would really help.

Cheers
Free

[Free]

Anybody?

Or should I re-post in the critique section?

[OsmosisStudios]

I dont know the CMS at all, so I cant be of much help, sadly.

The design works. I'd like to see some more space between the text block and the images on the second screencap. It's just a bit too crowded.

You should be able to just assign which page goes as the front page and which is the other page and so on. Like I said, I dont know the CMS and actually dont deal with them: I do it all by hand.

[Free]

Thanks OS,

I should have mentioned the screenshots have been shrunk around 50% to fit in DPS. Not sure if that will affect the spacing issue, but I'll certainly have a look at tweaking it anyway

You are spot on regarding the CMS, the user can assign any template to any page they want to, I'll also be making the thumbnail block optional on the non-gallery pages. I don't think people will really need them on the contact page

Not many people are familiar with MODx. To be honest while it is HEAPS easier for web designers to build custom templates into than Wordpress and easier for the end user to use a set up site, Wordpress is much easier to just download a template and set up for a non-technical person - as long as they don't want to modify the functionality too much.

If there's any interest when I'm finished, I suppose can always port the template to Wordpress *cringe*

Anyway, thanks for the feedback

[windrider86]

It's a holiday weekend in the U.S. so a lot of people may be out of town.
Are you going to have sub galleries or will it all be just one gallery?
it's nice and simple and seems easy enought to navigate.
I personally will just plain ol give up trying to look thru a web site if the navigation is tough or very slow to load.
I hate music unless you have the optiono fturnng it off.

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by Free

Thanks OS,

I should have mentioned the screenshots have been shrunk around 50% to fit in DPS. Not sure if that will affect the spacing issue, but I'll certainly have a look at tweaking it anyway

It's not an absolute spacing: its a ratio thing. There isnt enough space between the images and text block for it to be pleasing. I'd double it.

[Free]

Originally Posted by windrider86

It's a holiday weekend in the U.S. so a lot of people may be out of town.
Are you going to have sub galleries or will it all be just one gallery?
it's nice and simple and seems easy enought to navigate.
I personally will just plain ol give up trying to look thru a web site if the navigation is tough or very slow to load.
I hate music unless you have the optiono fturnng it off.

Thanks for the heads up.

After looking at peoples portfolios on DPS I realised it will need sub-galleries. That wont be any issue to implement in itself, however it will affect the home page design as I'll have to make it handle any number of sub-galleries that the sites need. It will be optional as to whether they are implemented though.

I try to build fast loading sites, so the output will all be simple xhtml and css with few images other than the actual photos, navigation will be all plain text to load quick and help SEO.

There will DEFINITELY be no music! Never, I hate it more than you I don't turn it off, I leave the site... And never go back!

Thanks OS, I'll check it out today.

Cheers
Free

[AnnaV]

I love the clean design, it looks very professional. There are so many naff websites out there that looked like they fell out of the 1970s (if they'd had websites back then), and this is DEFINITELY note one of them!