Lee Mawdsley  

Posted by John to Project Launches on August 28th, 2008  

Its previous incarnation had a few significant usability issues. Firstly, the entire site (and all the content) was stored in a swf. Secondly, it opened in a tiny 710 x 567px pop up window (full size screen shot).

So, Lee needed a clean, image-rich space to display his photography to prospective clients. It had to have large images that could be dragged onto a viewer's desktop. He also wanted visitors to be able to browse through collections using the full screen (as opposed to the full browser window). The final requirement was a robust, yet easy to use content management system to keep his site up to date.

The new homepage

Given the site's simple, portfolio structure, we decided to use Indexhibit as the CMS. It didn't take very long to write a few plug-ins to customize look and feel of homepage & gallery pages. There was also a wee bit of tweaking to the config files, but that was to be expected. To address the browse-images-in-full-screen-mode issue we used Marque's very own SWF Lightbox. All of the javascript animation was taken care of by script.aculo.us.

Screenshot of SWF Lightbox in action.