I made some spare time and had a really quick first cut at improving
the page. What I really need to do is get away from the computer and
start over with pencil & paper.
This is just a static file for testing purposes. I've completely
removed the outer border, lightened up the background and enlarged
the picture to 500 pixels height (it'll easily fit within 1024x768,
including the remaining border). For reference, the photos on my old
site are 600px high and these will also fit... if the browser has
small buttons. I may go to 600px if the file sizes don't become too
large.
http://www.bluemoon.net.nz/photo/temp/temp.html
For comparison the old one is still at:
http://www.bluemoon.net.nz/photo/printsdb/view.php?print_id=96&t=PAW
I think it's a little better but it still needs a lot of work. The
info stuff at the bottom is annoying me now, and I'll need to fiddle
with the grey as it's still a bit dark. I'd really like to keep at
least some kind of border to separate the picture from the
background. But that's unlikely to be coloured, and will probably be
even smaller than what I've done today.
Bear in mind that I want the same basic design to work for portrait,
landscape and panoramas so it's not going to be easy.
I had a look at the links you sent and they all have their ups &
downs... but I certainly don't need convincing about neutral
backgrounds. That was the first of my original design decisions
(then I went and put in those coloured borders, sigh... that was
related to my picture framing).
My old PAW index (link too long and my mailer will munge it) is
something simple I slapped together and I don't actually like it
myself. My new PAW index is a little more polished but now I think
that background is too dark as well. If you strip the "&mode=PAW"
bit off the URL you'll see the "gallery" view which is a different
way of doing much the same thing but you don't get the info. Please
note the PAW mode was done specifically for PDML who I assumed would
like to see more technical information than the general public would.
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
