This last month I've done two long road trips down to Southern Calfornia desert areas working the spring wildflower blooms. Since returning from the last trip about 10 days ago, I worked on a web based chronicle for my road trips that I wanted to break some new ground in presentation. Because I hand code in html/css/javascript instead of using canned html programming applications, I have somewhat more flexibility for doing things different. Of course different doesn't necessarily equate to better and that is a reason I'm posting herein as I'd be interested in any comments or opinions about the page and functional structure of what I've created since there are a fair number of members herein with savvy web talents.
I personally don't have a problem with the usual canned formats people use and for the most part, standard blog and gallery pages are proven and familiar to those who use and visit such web pages. Most don't tend to bore visitors with anything too lengthy nor include all that many images that are usually sprinkled down a page, sometimes with options to select larger sizes. People surfing the web often have limited time to dally and there are many others that in today's cultural mindset are simply impatient with anything beyond a few amusing images with brief one-liners for descriptions. Those are likely to spend 30 seconds on my site, see it is 9 pages long with considerable text, gasp, and immediately move on to places more fertile for their amusement. Some others may be interested but not have the time so will come back later when they do. However there is something to be said for novelty that breaks new ground that has the potential to attract some visitors simply because it provides something novel and different.
On my below web homepage, one can select the sub-page link to this feature at page top right:
Spring 2008 Wildflower Trip Chronicles April 2008
That brings up a Contents Page. At lower right is a link to a READme sub-page that explains the more novel items. One thing that will interest photographers is the way I've used thumbnails at the page sides on the chronicle pages to mouseover actuate larger sized images that then load into one's browser. That allows pages to load from a server with many small thumbnail images instead of the huge amount of bytes necessary to load full images. I could have set it up to actuate bringing up the full images by simply Mouse clicking thumbnails, however because the thumbnails take up so little page space on the edges of pages, it is somewhat functional to use mouseover actuation to open and mouseout to automatically close those windows that at least I'm expecting will tend to make readers open up images more often as they read down pages simply because it takes far less effort. One thing the currently evolved World Wide Web Internet has over newspaper and magazine media is the ability to provide more numbers of and better quality images to complement features. Thus I'm trying to more effectively make use of that advantage.
My Contents Page is admittedly rather cluttered since I include a gallery at page bottom. The gallery uses 250 pixel wide thumbnails or twice usual size in order to simply be different from what people usually see in gallery pages that I'm hoping plants a notion of more detail with large format. 250 pixels is about at the practical limit given common XVGA sized windows displays on most people's computers. That allows 4 image columns in the gallery that is what I would consider minimal while necessarily making them rather packed together. Accordingly used a contrasty black background to make that view more reasonably.
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