My brother is a photographer and I’m constantly pushing that he needs to have some sort of portfolio or something on the web, to promote his work and his awesome self. To that end he lets me go wild with creating a website for him and I’ve used his portfolio page to test various CMS systems and design ideas, some more useful than others (I’m looking at you concrete5).
The latest iteration runs on my Sections framework (gotta eat that dog food) and is based on the Foundation framework, which I have fallen absolutely in love with. The greatest part of the framework is how it adapts to the size of the screen and means that the website will work on mobile devices without me having to do anything.
Well almost, because having a layout which responds to the size of the screen means that you need to take into consideration where you apply padding, borders and margin so that when the content is shifted around it doesn’t break the style or you see the dreaded horizontal scrollbar. Mobile browsers have thrown a wrench into web design conventions, but with a responsive style framework and some forward thinking we may come up on top.
What the gallery looks like
Another thing I had to deal with was that everything was going to come from my brother’s flickr account, so that he can take pictures and put them up there without having to worry about his dumb stupid website that his geeky brother had thrown together for him. Also, instead of insisting on him only uploading images of a certain size, I just built a simple GD-based resizing script that would take any new images, resize them to the right formats and then save them in folders on the server. Now I had a steady stream of pictures that fit perfectly into the design I had built. Thank science for modern web development libraries!
I’m pretty happy with the result and my brother doesn’t have to do anything outside the usual to keep his website up-to-date.
