WWW site tips and examples?

[robc]

And to get back on topic..

Ed, to add to my original list of freebie software you might consider movabletype yourself.

The benefits are you can have a site up and running very quick. It has a content management system for text. It has a plethora of free plugins and templates some of which can create a gallery/photoblog section in your site.

You can go with a free template to start and when you've got upto speed on how it all works you can create your own templates. One of MT's strong points is that having created a new template you can regenerate the site from your exsiting content so you don't have to reinput anything. Also it generates static html if you want it to which helps greatly with performance.
Its highly configurable.

And its all free until you want to start using it for commercial purposes at which point you can buy the relevant license.

server requirements are Perl and MySql and its best to have PHP as well for some functionality. Imagemagick also but I think it works with GD libraries if ImageMagick is not available.
Most Unix based webserververs have all of the above installed.

check it out

www.sixapart.com/movabletype/pricing

www.sixapart.com/pronet/plugins/photos/index.html

Another one is

wordpress.org which is real simple to install, totally free but its pages are produced dynamically. Lots of free "Themes" for ths one too including photoblog themes. Requires PHP and MySQL

[Frank Petronio]

Movable Type is great but my sites are hand built, not from templates. And MT is only used on the front page and archive, certainly not for the photo galleries or case studies. MT or any of the database driven content management systems (or "blogging" software) is a great tool to use with a website, and it is true you can start with a Blogger or TypePad template that is a lot nicer than 99% of the other templates out there.

Sorry to be snippy but I put a lot into those "simple" sites that might not be obvious at a quick glance. The intent is to have the site design "get out of the way" but also to be seamless and do everything people need it to do. And MT makes them very easy to update on a frequent basis.

[Paul Butzi]

Here's a site that I'm sure some folks think is the bee's knees:
www.bf-collotype.com/

Several points: Immediately you browse to the 'splash' page, the site throws an ENORMOUS popup window. Despite the popup window being HUGE on my 1600x1200 screen, the window is actually filled with an enormous graphic. This graphic is really big - 700 x 1895 pixels, 266 kilobytes. Not only does it completely obscure the wonderfully irritating 'skip intro' animation, even on my huge screen, (thus irritating me even with my 3 megabit/second link) but will drive people using a dialup to just close the windows and move on. On a dialup link, this damn humongous graphic will take about a minute to download.

To top it off, the text in the graphic is rendered horribly. It's damn near unreadable on my screen. It's big, it's slow, and it's UGLY - a trifecta of defects.

Note that most people browse with a pop-up blocker, and thus will never see this big, ugly, slow to download graphic.

Once we get past the obnoxious popup, we are confronted with a slow moving 'skip intro'. Why are 'skip intro' animations bad? Because everyone who's used a browser for more than ten minutes has been ruthlessly trained to a) ignore the skip intro animation, and b) immediately start searching the browser window for the hidden text that reads 'skip intro' so they can skip the damn thing and get on with finding what they came to the website to see. That's why the damn things are called 'skip intro'!

Ok, so we've closed the popup, we've skipped the 'skip intro'. The main page we land on is another animation! Oh, no! We have to WAIT before it deigns to give us the menu of things we might do at this website. We search for the menu of options, but until the animation has rolled for a little while, we don't have a menu! Bad Website! No biscuit!

And because the whole damn thing is done with flash, it doesn't scale as the window size changes. If your window is too small, you have to use scroll bars. If it's too large, you end up with a huge, blank expanse of white with the little, bitty flash thing running in an island in the center.

If I click on 'exhibition', I get the same damn ugly huge popup I got before! Sorry guys, I've seen that!

If I click on 'book', I get treated to another window (bad website, no biscuit!) which runs another animation. It slowly, slowly shows me a book, one image at a time. I can't control the rate of frame changing. I can't speed it up, I can't search it, I can't pause it to examine something more closely. It's a little puzzle. What the hell is this? Is it more than one book? Is it all one book?

If I click on 'order form', I get ANOTHER WINDOW with the pdf order form in it.

Note that none of these new windows have normal navigation bars - oh, no. They don't want me to navigate, not even after they've opened enormous windows that obscure the main page window, even on my HONKIN' BIG 1600x1200 screen. I have to CLOSE THE DAMN WINDOW to explore more.

Meanwhile, in the background, hidden by these new, popped up windows, the main page animation is still running, sucking up resources.

Ok, let's explore more. Oh, no! When I click on the 'atelier' link, I get ANOTHER HUGE NEW WINDOW WITH AN ANIMATION! So I sit and wait, and eventually it gives me some text. It's hard to read the text, because it's sized for some little dinky low res display (unlike the other big windows, which would be impossible to read on a smaller display). Because it's flash, I can't scale the text using the browser text size control. Bad website! No biscuit!

There's no scroll bar to indicate that we can scroll this text, but if we're adventurous, we can try mousing over the two, unlabeled triangles. The scroll the text up and down - now, that's intuitive. You don't have to click on them, just mousing over them scrolls the text - an interaction model completely unlike all the websites we've ever visited before. The entire world knows what scroll bars are for, but we have to learn something NEW to use this damn website. Lots of people will never figure this out, so the rest of the text will go unread. The text is damn hard to read on my screen anyway, because it's so darn small, and the browser text size control doesn't work.

Clicking on the 'next' thingie (which is small, hard to see, and harder to read) 'turns the page'. That's nice, but it takes a frickin' eon to do it, and I have to sit and twiddle my thumbs while it happens.

Sorry, I just don't have time to wait for ten seconds just to get the next damn page. I close that window, leaving the whole saga unread. Too frustrating for me, and probably for everyone who isn't employed by or married to the person who designed the website.

Net result: I've learned nothing from visiting the website except that some website designs just tick me off. Nothing on this website is indexable by search engines, and search engines drive the VAST majority of website visits. We've got a website that's slow, requires a fast link to view, doesn't adjust for monitor size, and can't be found by search engines. Wow, that's great.

Bottom line: if your website is supposed to replace your demo tape, flash is fine. If it's supposed to actually allow people to find things, it's a bad plan. If you need flash to show people your demo tape - go ahead. Just embed the flash thingie behind a link that says 'Demo Tape' on the main page of your normal, html website.

[Oren Grad]

Well, the collotype website evidently almost didn't work at all when I went to it, perhaps because I'm blocking popups. All I got was the small frame with the main animation/menus, and none of the menus worked.

Probably just as well, given what Paul reports. But my conclusion is the same as his - hardly a way to win friends for whatever it is you're trying to promote.