Hi,
3 sites that I particularly like are
Mary Ellen Mark at www.maryellenmark.com
Magnum at www.magnumphotos.com
Reportage at www.reportage.org
they are clean and simple, with the emphasis on content. I like a site
to have an index of thumbnails, in the way the pug has, so you can get
an overview of what's there and choose by random access.
I particularly like the way MEM has thumbnails of the whole gallery
subsesction you're in on each page. The Reportage site is notable because
it scrolls across rather than down. This is unusual but effective, imo.
At times the Reportage site falls into the 'click here for yet another
page with no content' trap. In fact, the words 'Click here...' or
equivalent are a bit of a red flag that the designer has stopped
thinking. The Magnum site is great content right from the word 'go', but it
can be a bit slow for my hopeless little home PC.
What I really, really hate are sites that have useless pages such as 'click
here to enter my site', 'click here to enter the gallery' bla bla.
Commercial sites sometimes do this to make you look at adverts. I
usually click elsewhere to get out. When you get to the gallery it's just one
picture after another, sequentially, with no indication of how many there are,
and what's coming next. In this sort of user interface the emphasis should be
on content and on the user being in control.
Photos look best against a plain, neutral background. Think of museums
& photo galleries - white walls, simple frames, plain mattes. You don't
see photographs in museums displayed in heavy gold roccoco frames against
crimson flock wallpaper, so you shouldn't do the webby equivalent.
Captions should be limited to who, what, when, where and why.
Don't tell the viewer what to think.
Don't tell the viewer why the picture isn't better than it is, don't
offer excuses ('Maybe I should have been a bit to the right so Auntie
Flo's head wouldn't be in the way. Then you could have seen the last
surviving dodo just before my dog got it, but my shoes were pinching
me a bit and I didn't want to take 2 steps to the right').
Avoid kitsch titles (see PUG for plenty of examples. Sorry!!).
Avoid pretentious titles (eg a photo of your toe-nail clippings entitled
'Metaphysical universe #9 in satin. 3rd reprise a la turque').
In fact, avoid titles.
I personally am not interested in what equipment, film or f-stop you
used, unless it really is of great importance, but I suppose some people
like that. Keep it separate from the caption, and be consistent from page
to page about where controls, and information are laid out.
My own website is www.web-options.com/index.htm. I unashamedly stole
ideas from Mary Ellen Mark and the PUG. The idea for a thumbnail for
the 'previous' and 'next' controls belongs to Ralf Stubner.
The big problem with my site is that all the code is hand-crafted, which
makes it difficult to maintain. If I add another menu item I will have to
change every page to include it. It's also not W3C conformant. When I get
the energy to do version 2 I will use a frame-based menu system, and probably
write a simple program to generate compliant html.
"A good artist copies. A great artist steals" - Picasso (I think). But that
doesn't mean that everybody who steals is a great artist!
Hope that's of some use to you.
---
Bob
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Friday, April 13, 2001, 2:10:10 AM, you wrote:
[...]
> So, help me out here, group! If you think your site is Boss, or you know
> of someone else's, please tell me. I promise not to steal, just to get
> ideas; and probably just temporary as we work on a permanent site.
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