As I told on my last post in 2007, Opera and Safari browsers were not rendering properly my pages. Moreover on the galleries pages there were still tables and the state of art of the web design literature suggests to avoid the use of the tables, moving to a fluid layout.
For that reason last winter I decided to rebuild my pages trying to optimize both technical and business aspects.
From a business point of view I've chosen Google Adsense and Amazon Associates programs and I've dedicated to these programs some spaces in almost each page of my website. Six main banners and two referral buttons are now present all around the main content, in order to give to the advertisers a place to attract their customers.
Another business innovation was the presence of my mother tongue (Italian) pages, with an Italian homepage and some information pages on Licensing Images, Fine Art Prints purchase and contact information.
From a technical side I basically moved from a table-based gallery to a list-based gallery in which the list items are the thumbnails. I added also two active icons: a magnifier and a shopping cart. The former gives to the user the opportunity to reach directly the slideshow page of the thumbnail and the latter is associated to a PHP function in order to access to a purchase page.
The length/width of the thumbnails was another technical problem I had to face with. I had to distinguish in vertical and horizontal ones.
This is due to the fact that CSS max-width/max-length property is not supported by Internet Explorer 6 and its previous versions. So I had to approach two different classes of thumbnails (vertical and horizontal thumbnails) with exactly the same attributes, except for the width/length that are obviously reversed.
Last technical innovations were the modifications to sibling/relative categories (below the search field) in order to give to the visitors a tool to surf easily through the site (jumping from a branch to another one of an hypothetical tree representing the website) and the slideshow counter, to show the number of slideshow page currently viewed.
Thanks to the siblings a visitor can surf on the website "as on a tree": for example if you are visiting Vermont Gallery you can use the "siblings path" to go "up" to the United States gallery (the parent), "down" to the children galleries (different Vermont slideshows) or to jump to the other galleries at the same level (i.e. some US states or collections).
This feature assures a better easiness for visitors and increases reachability of the site itself.
