There are thousands of sites out there that deal with this hobby of ours, some of them are really good and some, although the do the job they are meant to do, are less appealing. I thought I'd share the thinking behind my site design so that, like the site or not, you'd have some idea about how it is supposed to work.
This is site was constructed on a computer with a screen resolution of 1024x768 and so this is likely to be the best resolution to look at it with. Larger resolutions should still be fine, but much smaller ones are likely to squash some aspects of the layout somewhat, but it should still be usable. I have tested its appearance throughout with IE 6.0 and Firefox 1.5 and it works fine with both. Changing the view size should not cause major problems, unless super, extra-large is selected in Firefox. If you haven't got Firefox yet, go get it, it is not only a better browser, it also makes life a lot easier for those of us designing websites. The site will not currently view very well in IE 5.0 or 5.5, due to the way it applies CSS but it is still functional and you can still see the gallery pictures.
The markup for the site is XHTML and the site layout is achieved via CSS - there are no layout tables on this site. CSS is a great tool for web design. If you are not familiar with the idea behind it, using CSS means that you write basic webpages as normal but have little or nothing in the file to decide layout. You then write a seperate file (the CSS file) that determines layout such as positioning, columns, backgrounds etc. The advantage of this is that all of your pages link to the one layout file so changing one file will change the layout of all of your web pages. For example, if you want to change the font or background colour for your whole site then you don't have to change every single page, just the code in one file. Having said that, this site has two CSS files, one for the gallery pages and one for the rest. This is basically because the gallery pages are so different I wanted to keep the layout rules for them in a different file. There are also embedded CSS instructions in the homepage file. This means that the CSS instructions occur in a seperate part of the same file as the XHTML. This is common if you have one page of your site that is very different to the rest.
There is plenty of excellent help out there on writing your own pages. A good place to start is the w3schools, a site run by the W3C (the world wide web consortium) who basically oversee web development. To teach myself CSS I used "Stylin'with CSS" by Charles Wyke-Smith and "The CSS Anthology" by Rachel Andrew. I can thoroughly recommend both but if you are a complete beginner to web design, get some basic knowledge of HTML first. I must also say that the CSS and code for my galleries is modified from a tutorial in Practical Web Design magazine. This has also been a really useful resource not just in learning about markup and CSS etc, but also about the design aspects of writing webpages. My first design for these pages was very poor compared to those I have now.
So what about the design? The basic idea is to have a very simple, straight-forward layout, using a small number of complementary colours that are neutral in tone. A simple and muted design will help highlight the pictures. The sepia tones are obviously influenced by old photographs, relevant of course because this site is basically to view photographs of my figures. The navigation bar is again very simple although I did allow myself the small luxury of italicising a link when hovering over it, just to add a very small amount of movement to a static site. The pictures in the gallery were compiled in some graphics software, using a gradient fill background that again helps the picture to stand out from the rest of the page, although I was careful not to use bright colours. The banner across the top was again created in graphics software, using the same colour scheme, with silhouettes of some of my figures and a close-up of one. This obviously lets people have some idea of the content. The whole site is designed in a clear, easy-to-read sans-serif font and I have deliberately made it quite large, again to keep the design clean and clear.
I have no doubt that, as the site develops, it will change. At some point I am going to get bored with it and give it a radical change but, at least with CSS, this should be relatively painless. I have all sorts of plans for it but first I need to learn Flash, Javascript, PHP, MySQL....
Thanks for reading.