For this project I chose to do an online exhibition, as I though it would be a useful subject to research and understand.
I know a number of people in the custom car scene, so I chose to exhibit some of their photography. I love this collection of photos, as they are taken from the perspective of those who are passionate about custom cars and hot rods, rather than from the perspective of a professional photographer. I started out searching for images on Flickr, and wrote to the owners of the photos I liked, asking permission to use the images for a school assignment. When I didn’t hear back from any of them after a week, I thought it would be worth asking people I know, and this worked out well because they were interested, encouraging and excited about the project.
Although I struggled to understand html code for the first few weeks, I don’t feel as scared of it now, and have even enjoyed experimenting with the layout and style options using html and css.
I researched several options to create image galleries and slide shows, including image loop, Smilebox, Slideroll, Picasa, highslide, ZenPhoto and more. Although Picasa was easy to use, I didn’t really want to use a slideshow. I really liked the image gallery examples on highslide and Zenphoto, but had trouble getting them to work on my site, and didn’t understand what I was doing to make it work. I will definitely work towards understanding how to these tools though, as part of my ongoing learning and development in building web pages.
In the end I settled on using a code generator – Creating Online – to obtain the html code required for an image gallery which is set up like a table. Once I had the code, I was able to change it to suit, and this really helped me to understand how to create and do more with html. The specific things I learnt during this process include creating tables, creating thumbnails and links from images stored on Flickr and photobucket, resizing thumbnails and networking with other sites to reduce the need to store images on my computer.
I created backgrounds for the pages but decided on a simple black background, as I wanted the images and photographer profiles to stand on their own, without additional graphics or backgrounds to distract from them. The font for the heading on each page was chosen for it’s reminiscence to the era of the cars in the exhibition. As this wasn’t a standard font, I created these headings as images, and then used a standard font for the rest of the text in the pages.
Although I considered using a slideshow to exhibit the work of each photographer, I thought this didn’t give the viewer enough control, as they may not want to view all of the images. It was satisfying to learn how an image gallery can be created using a table within the html code, and it allows the viewer to glance at the images of each artist, and view the images that interest them more closely. The sixty photographs used in the exhibition have been linked to external sites, and the thumbnails were also created from links to these external sites. I like the idea that fewer images need to be stored on a computer, and I’m sure this would appeal to a lot of people, as they could have a website built for them but manage the galleries from their image sharing pages.
I wasn’t sure how to go about submitting the assignment, but wanted to package my six html files, one css file and six image files, and make it accessible from a single URL. I heard about webs in class, which was very easy to use and worked straight away, allowing you to upload your html pages and any associated CSS and image files.
I did struggle with this assignment, and found myself going in circles, which was frustrating as I was worried about running short of time. Although I’d like to have used one of the image galleries from highslide or Zenphoto, I’m glad that I’ve been able to work with html, as it has increased my confidence in building web pages.
My project can be viewed online through this link – CustomCollection.
SMackdown! 