Research

•  Research One: Existing web sites and layouts

Existing photography portfolio's that I like.
Rankin Photography
I really like the homepage of Rankins website. He has slideshows of his images, I could use this idea of slideshows in my work using Flash to create them.
Using these slideshows helps to show the photographers work.
The colours are simple, black and white, yet give a neat and professional look.

Richard Warren Photography
Richard Warren uses a thumbnail structure to display his work. Once a thumbnail is selected it is linked to another page which shows a slider of all the work in that series. I can corporate this in my work through displaying a thumbnail which once clicked opens a larger version of the thumbnail image.
Again the colour scheme is white and black, similar to Rankin's website.

David LaChapelle
I really like the homepage of this website, the background is filled with images of David LaChapelle's work on a slideshow or loop. I would like to try and use this idea for my homepage however it will be difficult to make.

Stephen Eastwood Photography
Again this website uses a slider to show the photographers images.

From all the websites I've looked at, most of them have black and white colour schemes. These along with grey are the best colours to display and compliment photographs.

•  Reseacrch Two: Colour

Complementary Colours

 

 Complementary colours are those that are places opposite eachother on the colour wheel. When used together they give a high contrast, vibrant, lively feel. 

Complementary colours are often used as part of logo's or advertisements as they are seen as 'aesthetically pleasing'. 

However using a colour such as red, for a background and green for its text, then this becomes uncomfortable for the eye and difficult to read. 

Analogous Colours

Analogous colours are the three colours placed next to eachother on the colour wheel. They create a comfortable and relaxing design which pleasing to the eye. 

The colours all accent eachother in a complementing way. The combinations of the analgous colours can create differing moods in the audience.

I will go onto discuss this in my next research section. 

Colours and moods

Colours are very powerful when it comes to setting moods with the audience, as each colour holds a seperate interpretation of what it means. 

Some information taken from  

http://iit.bloomu.edu/vthc/design/psychology.htm

My possible colour schemes:

• Research Three: Layout and designs

Layout
Layout is an important part of a website, it must be easy to understand and navigate around by the audience.

Things to take into consideration when designing a layout for a website:

• Margins
• Borders
• Text box
• Image box
• White/negative space
• Text/ font style
• Font style
• Tabs or page to page links

My layout examples/ideas
Layout 1

 Layout 2

 Layout 3

These layouts where made using the numbers 1and 2 web design handouts, therefore I used photoshop to create them therefore they are sliced and saved as web formats.
Ithink that my first layout design is the strongest, with the layout, and also the choice of colour as it portrays a clean, professional look.

Adding to Lightbox
Adding the 'next' and 'prev' tabs to my lightbox will make it eaier for the audience to flick from one photo to another. 

http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox2/#how


Writing a word in square brackets after rel="lightbox[word]" into the lightbox code will create the 'prev' and 'next' tab as long as i have the gif's for these in my lightbox css folder, which I do.
See my developing my website page for the result of adding this code.

Adding link to my email

I searched in Google how to link my email to my website, I came across this website that showed a video about how to do it.

Add the Email Link Tag

'First, open your html document of the page where you want the link to go. Type an a tag, then href=mailto:(semicolon)don@about.com the text you want on your page, I'll type Email Don (close brackets and close the a tag if you haven t done so already).

a href= mailto:don@about.com Email Don /a '
http://video.about.com/webdesign/Add-a-Link-to-an-Email-Address.htm

Add link to web page
I decided to add a link from my web portfolio, to my blog, this meant that the public can follow my work, as well as look at my other blogs.

'To name a portion of a page, surround some text (or an image or other object) with <a></a> tags. And give that anchor a name. For example:

<a name="internal">Internal Links</a>

While you don't have to surround anything with the <a name> tags, it is a good idea. Some browsers can get confused if they think they have to link to "nothing". Also, keep your name anchors out of tables, if possible. This also can confuse browsers.
Once you have named a portion of your page, link to it using a standard <a href=""> tag. Only, in the href portion, point to the name with a pound-sign (#) at the front. For example:

<a href="#internal">go to internal links</a>

This would link to a section of your page labeled:

<a name="internal"></a>'

http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/a/aabg120598.htm

Getting code for slideshow
I searched for 'cycle pluggin' in google, this gave me a page which had jquery code which I downloaded.
The slideshow I chose was fade, as I think it works best with my website, creating a simplistic, professional look.

This code is to go into my web page

http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/