I’m happy to announce our new design number 3 called Brooklyn Bridge. We combined a few features from the first two designs (Manhattan and Brooklyn), came up with a new way to display the thumbnails and an exciting full screen homepage slideshow.
Let me fist explain the overall idea behind this new design. I wanted to use the dynamic resizing of the images in D2 with the fixed and open menu of D1. This makes this site incredibly client friendly. In addition to that I wanted the thumbnails to display every thumb for every picture in your entire site (except hidden and password protected of course). Again, another client friendly application that will allow them to scan the entire site in a matter of minutes. Finally, I wanted to do something cool with the homepage slide show. We made it so you could have the images fill the browser frame with your logo and menu overlaid on top (you can opt to have the slideshow normal if you like).
Here’s an example of the full frame slideshow: http://www.adarknessvisible.com
You will notice in that example where we made it possible for you to have your whole site display full frame with the logo and menu overlaid on top of the images. The only downside to doing this besides having your menu on top of the images is that it will crop the side or the bottom of your image to fit in whatever size browser window your client has open.
Here’s a demo of the new site as I envisioned it: http://72.32.9.12/~smurphy
Here’s an example of someone already using it:
Now, while we were making the settings for the new site we decided to give you all kinds of control in the template settings. You can:
Set the width of the border on all 4 sides.
Set the width of the menu.
Set the vertical and horizontal position of the menu.
Adjust the transparency of the menu box color.
Adjust the transparency of your logo/text title.
Set the font size of the menu categories/pages.
Set the font size of the galleries/sub menu items.
Set the font size of the bottom navigation bar.
Determine the vertical position of the bottom navigation bar.
Set the font size of the bottom contact info and copyright.
Determine the vertical position of the bottom contact info and copyright.
That can make the settings kinda complicated so I have some help on the setup page with an explanation of the settings and a map showing where the effect takes place. http://aphotofolio.com/design-3-brooklyn-bridge/
Since we launched 3 months ago we’ve added password protected and hidden galleries and we’re on track to add video support to all the sites by late December.
Visit here to signup: https://aphotofolio.com/signup
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This is truely breath taking! A new standard in web design!
Congratulations guys!!!
B5
One issue about thumbnails with third design, everytime I click thumbnails it starts with the first photo from the first album. Let’s say i’m going through LeeAnn’s photos, lokking at Portrait section, wanna see all the portraits in thumbnails, but the first thumbnail is always the first photo from the first album. They I have to wait for everything to load and then find Portrait thumbnails again which are way down somewhere.
Thumbnail list should open and start loading with the thumbnail of the photo I was looking at just before clicking thumb label.
It’s something we’re looking at changing. If you click on the number (1 of 45) then you get the thumbs for that gallery (portraits) only but that’s not obvious.
We’re working on making it faster at the moment and then we will address the start location issue.
The idea behind it is that a client will come looking for something in particular and instead of scrolling through all the books just hit thumbs to scroll the entire portfolio. In general clients aren’t going to use thumbs to navigate a book (maybe that will change now that we’ve made them bigger) but instead use them to make sure they haven’t missed something or when looking for something very specific. In both of those cases starting at the beginning makes sense to me.
Would it be possible to set the speed at which one scrolls over the expanded thumbnails? I noticed while looking through the beautiful work of Seamus Murphy that due to the speed of the scroll action one often clicks on the image adjacent to the one that you are aiming for.
Other than that I think the new design is excellent. I’ve been shopping around for a template site for a while now. Design 3 has that extra little bit that I was looking for.
Thank you for all your hard work.