ADANGIO.COM 2007 is now live
17th April 2007
Welcome to the launch of my new look site. I felt the site needed a redesign and rethink in terms of content and architecture, so I have spent the past month researching photography websites and determining the ideal solution for showcasing my portfolio in terms of balancing useability and also retaining an aesthetically pleasing design. The most important thing for me out of this project - and I freely admit this is due to my recent corporate exposure to the web - was to ensure the site was accessible across all browsers and conformed to W3C standards. The site has been tested to work on both PC and Macintosh platforms with full browser support from Internet Explorer 5.5,6 and 7, Firefox 1, 1.5 and 2 and Safari on the Macintosh. The problems faced with the first iteration of the site were mainly accessibility issues - the main change has been the functionality of the thumbnail gallery. I felt the way the images appeared on "mouse rollover" were distracting and have now changed it to be a mouse click event - which gives the user a more pleasing journey (especially since there is information now attached to every photograph).
I have decided to include a small synopsis for each photo as well as basic camera settings, which I've always found handy when browsing other photographers' websites in terms of learning and understanding the settings used in capturing great images. Hopefully some of the images you see will have a follow-on effect from my site as well. I also felt that it was time to cull an enormous quantity of images. The problem you face when venturing out and taking photos as often as I do is that every new experience brings photos that you want to showcase. I found myself falling into the trap of continuously uploading new photos, thus the gallery became an arduous task for me, let alone anyone wanting to look through the site. Ultimately, this is meant as a showcase of my best work - not a "Flickr" type account, so I spent several nights sifting through over 10,000 photos to reduce the numbers down to what I think is a reasonable amount to showcase. I've limited all galleries to 30 photos (with the exception of the model gallery, which will grow as I take more photo shoots), but they are also limited to 10 photos per model.
On the subject of the models, I have made a significant change to the functionality of this as well. Notably, I've made this section a protected gallery for a few reason. Due to increasing number of models, I have decided to give each model a gallery of their own. More importantly though, I've protected it due to the privacy and rights of each model. Model galleries can only be viewed by entering the model's first name and first letter of their surname. Whilst I am not looking at making this protection ultra cryptic, the idea is to simply not make their entire collections readily available for external linking from other sites. In addition, as mentioned on the site, certain photographs could be considered unsuitable for people under 18 years of age or anyone offended by fine art nudity - for legal reasons and to make the site more user acceptable, I have decided to go down this route.
As you are reading this, you will undoubtedly know by now that I've added a blog section. I'd rather call it a blog section than a "latest news" section because it allows me to freely express anything related to photography - from my own personal experiences, to perhaps equipment review, personal announcements etc. Anyway, "news" sounds too formal for me!
The rest of the functionality is the same - I've retained the interactive slideshow and added what I consider to be an urban, gritty flash introduction (again, with accessibility in mind, I have not hindered the useability of the site by introducing this intro as the entire navigation is still accessible throughout the movie).
All in all, I am very pleased with the design - it's taken me a while to put together and develop dynamically, but I hope you think it's worth it. As always, feedback on the photography (as well as the design of the site) is always welcomed. Stay tuned for further enhancements as time goes on.
Thanks again for visiting, and I hope you like the new look website :-)
Anthony.