Putting my website together!

Over the past few months one things I have been spending a decent amount of time of is putting my website together. In stead of straight out buying a domain name and creating a website from scratch I have gone through a hosting site that will host my website and have my own domain name at the same time. The hosting site that I have chosen to use is Digital Photographers Gallery. This site seamed like the best option for hosting my website as I have seen previous websites and am really impressed with how the look and work.

I must admit it took me a little while to get to grips with navigating the website and getting the full use from it to put my work together how I could see it in my head.

First I went through some of my most recent photography work to see what I wanted to include on my website and I put a few different images into a folder so I knew exactly what I wanted on there,

 

I wanted to separate my photographs into different categories, even though it is very much all nature and landscape based there is different areas that I have photographs based on, so I wanted to keep them separate so if someone wants to look at a certain type of thing they will know exactly where to find that type of image. 

On the items tab that can be seen below I created different pages to break the types of photographs down into categories. I unchecked the gallery link as I didn't want all of the photographs in one place, which is what would have happened if I were to upload everything into one area. I then created a few different page links titled landscapes, nature, wildlife and other - the different categories that I wanted to use throughout.  I also have home, about and contact pages where different information can be found.

I found that when I added in now pages they went into a strange order so I reorganized everything that put them into an order that I was happy with and one that would flow throughout.

Below is an example of how some of the pages are active whereas some are deactivated as I didn't want them within my website, the deactivation can be seen on the gallery link;

I then started to look at the deign of my website and what I wanted people to get from it, I wan to have a website that is easily navigated and shows my work to its best. I chose a theme from the ones that are openly available on the site itself;

With this theme it enabled me to have my images almost full bleed across the page and when selecting and image link, such as the landscape images you scroll through them horizontally using the scroll bar at the bottom on the page or navigating using the right and left arrows which i quite like.  The theme is really only the main thing that I altered, I left all of the tap link colours and things like that the same colour as the theme set them to as they work well with what I want. One thing I changed was that I wanted the home page to display a slide show of some of my photographs, so as soon as people clicked onto my site they could see some variations of the type of photographs I take.

I simply wanted the header on my page to say 'Lauren Morris - Photography' which I changed in the settings.

And this is what it looks like displayed on the website I am designing;

Above you can see the different links that I have added in to separate my photographs into categories, at the moment I am happy with the design and it is something that still needs working on, just with uploading and categorizing all my photographs.

I uploaded some of the photographs I wanted to use onto the designing area of the site;

 

Then from the different link i created for the categories, different folders had been made so that I could select photographs to go in certain folders which would put them into the different sub headings, or links on my site. 

As an example here are the images that I have put into the 'Landscape' section of my website;

and this is what they look like actually displayed on my website now

Here you can also see the horizontal scroll and the other navigation that is available via the 'back', 'previous' and 'next' buttons as well as the use of the arrow keys.

This is just one axample of what I have done with the different sub headings within my site but I have done the same thing on every other page but just broken down my images and placed them into different headings depending on what they fit best within.

After I loaded all of my photographs into the different sub headings I arranged them into specific orders, ones that I felt flowed and worked the best for all of the images that I have used at this point.

I then started to think about the different types of contact and social media sites that I am using and wanted to link onto my site. The only site that I really want people to have access to are my Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest, but I also wanted people to be able to like and share the work on my site as well as talk about it via Twitter and Facebook.

 

You can see below what this now looks like on the homepage of my website, all of the links to the left are visible no matter what section of the website you click onto, so it is always there to use as a quick navigation if needed.

At the moment I have a small selection of photographs uploaded onto my site, I still need to add some more on into the different sections to show more af a variaty of work.

My contact page and about my pages are very simple and brief, I want to work on them a little bit to make them better but from a design point of view and how it is all flowing I am very pleased with how my website is looking.

I also want to purchase my own domain name for when I actually make my website live, this is so I can advertise it and also get it printed onto business cards and put it out there in different places.