I’m often asked how particular features of this website were developed and deployed so I thought I would write a little article which gave a little more information. Work started on the site probably 15 months ago (October 2006). I had worked on a few website projects before so I was pretty familiar with website design and promotion and felt that I could do this myself. Unlike other projects I’ve been involved with, financial constraints would not be an issue during development, the major constraint was going to be time. I realised this was going to involve a major trade off between shooting new images and sitting on the computer creating code.

Initially, I sat down with a blank piece of paper and brainstormed what I would like to see on the site. I wanted to make the site both functional and fun. The next step was to decide exactly how I wanted to implement these features and what resources I would need to implement them. This involved a lot of scouring the internet trying various pieces of software and scripts to see if they could operate the way I want. I wanted to make the site easy to use but also to do what it is supposed to do. I use Apple Macs and one of the easiest ways of creating a web site is to use iWeb. Most of the time, constructing a site in iWeb is simply drag, drop and publish. I wanted the site to look consistently great throughout, and because graphic design is not a strong point i felt an iWeb template from 11 Mystics produced a great look at a low cost. Using iWeb was a great time saver particularly when trying different things. You can only imagine how many times I looked at a page and just thought ‘I think I need to start again here!’ because it either looked awful or didn’t work the way I wanted it to. One of the major drawbacks to using iWeb is implementing features that iWeb can not handle, this was particularly a problem in version 1 (which I used). After creating and publishing the pages in iWeb, I used iWebmore. This handy utility allowed me to insert my own code on my pages. I used Bare Bones’s Textwrangler to edit all of my html/css pages. I added a lot of code such as meta-data, scripts and multimedia objects. Another utility I made good use of is A Better Finder Rename, this has been and will continue to be a huge time saver when renaming files.

You may have noticed this website uses a number of scripts to enhance it’s functionality. That is the key, only use a script where it actually adds value, saying that some of the scripts have been specially selected because not only to do they add functionality but they also have a great look. A couple of scripts i’ll list here have done just that, Highslide JS has been added to allow users to view images at a larger size without leaving the page. It is also great for displaying Ajax/HTML content, for example I use it extensively in the Store pages for frame options and previews. The major benefit to this script is it saves having to create more pages for the user to navigate. Slideshow Pro is a flash plug-in which delivers great slideshows. I have used this in the Portfolio pages and hopefully you will find this an attractive but easy to use feature. There are many other scripts used but the list is so extensive I haven’t the time to mention them all. To quickly summarise, this site includes XHTML, DHTML, PHP/Javascript/Ajax Scripting, uses a heap of MySQL databases. It has over 2000 pages, weighs in at 9.5 GB in size.

I have just updated the blogging software to WordPress so the blog will be easier to update regularly and I look forward to posting more. The site is not quite finished just yet, I will be adding a few exciting new features/products by the end of March(ish) and will continue refining the site on an ongoing basis. There are also a few features that will get some serious reconstructive surgery over the course of the year. In the mean time the work goes on, images need capturing, the site needs promoting and I need a bit of sleep!!!