About a week ago Teresas and my updated photography portfolio website went online - www.iconoclash-photography.com. If you like to browse through photos, do take a look!
There are still some sections missing, but the portrait portfolio as well as the wedding portfolio and 3 more individual samples are already online. There is also some information on how we work and before and after samples of the digital development and retouching we do.
The rest of this post is about technical details about the page, so read on if you are interested in this kind of thing, everybody else will probably be terribly bored by all this :).
The page is currently flash 9+ only. This will probably enrage a few people as flash is a proprietary plugin that has a very poor security record, but it is sadly still the only thing that allows rich, cross-browser/platform consistent content authoring and that has a reasonably big install base.
Rich content authoring is often used as a euphemism for things that no one ever needed but that some web designer thought would be cool. What I care about in a portfolio website is not the ability to use video, but precise control over the typography, the ability to animate images and as little problems as possible in the process. Sadly, html still provides none of the above.
The only other contestant btw would have been Microsofts Silverlight. While it seems very promising (especially the programming model, which in version 2 is a pretty complete version of the .NET environment plus an XML based markup language for the design of the gui elements) the install base is too small at the moment.
The site itself is one main flash file that I did in Flash with quite a bit of Actionscript 3 for the fade effects and navigation logic, and a modified version of Autoviewer Pro for the gallery.
Flash has come a long way since it's early days, and while there are still a lot of things that are pretty silly and smell of bad compromise, all in all it has become a pretty decent tool. Things like SWFAddress, a small flash component and java script, make it possible to have deep links in one flash file, which means the URL in the address bar changes when you click around inside the flash object and enables the browser back button to work like it would with conventional HTML pages. This last thing is something that I always found to be very important, as using the back button to navigate is such an important concept in the web. Oh, and SWFAddress also allows you to use Google Analytics to see which pages our visitors actually look at, which is important information to make future versions of our website better to navigate.
When we thought we were done with our site, we posted it to photo.net and asked for feedback. One of the things we learned from this was that some people were too impatient to wait for the fade effects to complete, so we implemented the quick navigation feature on the top right side.
Creating and especially fine tuning the website so that everything looks pretty and works like expected was a lot of work, but I think that it was worth it. Hopefully we will still like it in a year and can concentrate more on making photos now :)
