I have been looking at some of the gallery options that I think would suit the type of site I would like to make. I think lots of them are a bit too gimmicky for a designer. After looking at a great number of portfolio sites, I think this can end up being quite off-putting, and not really very stylish. The ones I like are quite simple. Most are on the Picsviewr site, some it is easy to change the background colour, some I am not so sure, I think I would like a white background at the moment.

                         I really like this last slider, it squashes the images and shows them as tabs for you to click on to open the picture you want. I would like to use this but not sure if it is appropriate for a gallery.

I have a vague idea what I would like my logo to look like, so started trying out some faces.

I want to make the logo seem personal and friendly, so I tried a few logo designs using the handwriting fonts that I like.

  

I had a look at quite a few other free gallery sites. Portfolio and Carbonmade had some that I liked. The ones I liked the best though were on Cargo. I’m not sure at the moment how tricky it is to use.

    

I did a couple of layouts using the logos I liked and some of the gallery ideas.

    

I have signed up for a Carbonmade site, also Cargo, which I really like. I am going to add my work to both of these but first I am going to have another go with Dreamweaver, it maybe the last…Rapidweaver beckons!

Firstly I made a final,(I hope) decision on the logo.  

I loaded a Pictobrowser into the first page I tried. I was quite pleased with the result but wanted to try my own layout in Dreamweaver using slimbox pop out boxes.

 

I layed out the Home page in Photoshop. I’m not sure about the navigation at the moment. I would like to look at locked tabs on the side. I’ll see what I can find. I am planning to have four pages at the moment, with links in the Home page boxes to the Web and Print page galleries.

On the two gallery pages will be cropped pictures of the work which when clicked will open as slimbox pictures. I was going to put small pictures butted up together as the gallery page but changed my mind and decided to put one cropped picture to open. Looking at this now I think I am going to change my mind again. I think it will be easier for a viewer to get a quick idea of the work if more pictures are easily visible.I thought it looked messy showing different pages of the same site next to each other, and boring for someone trying to get a quick overview of the work. In the end I decided to have 3 columns of thumbnails with a small white border between them. This means that I can add as many rows as I like, just scrolling down the page to view but putting side navigation which I will try and find out how to fix position so that the visitor will be able to navigate between pages however far down the page they scroll.I tried the navigation at the side and experimented with the number of columns and layout of the page.  

I will put the social network links under the main boxes.