Aunt Linda's new website

For my Aunt Linda's birthday (May 29th), I decided to build her a website to display her photography. As far back as I can remember, every memory I have of every family event involves Aunt Lin behind the lens of her camera. A few years ago she went digital, and following each gathering she would faithfully send a link to her uploaded photos at walgreens.com or some similar upload-and-print service. I thought it would be nice for her to have a better way to display and archive her best shots, and so far she's off to a good start.

I'm a WordPress guy, so I decided that her site would be a good practice run with the new version 2.5 that was recently released. I looked at a couple dozen photoblogging themes, and finally decided that Nishita would be a good place to start. I immediately added jQuery support, and put it to work in an accordion menu in the sidebar of the archives page, and in the post metadata bar (Comments and More Info are hidden by default, but can be revealed by clicking on their respective links). I think I want to do something a little different with the "Complete Archives" page that shows every picture ever posted on the site, but that will have to wait until there are a few more images there to work with.

I also added a random image bar just above the footer. It displays eight random thumbnails that link to the individual posts. Each thumbnail image is 75×75, thanks to the new thumbnail processing functionality built into WP 2.5. This should give visitors one more way to explore and find new pictures on the site.

Since WP is built for blogging, and this site was intended to be an overgrown image gallery, I had to think through how the posts/images should be organized. As it stands, there are basically four different ways to view the site's organization.

The first is by date, which is the default presentation. The most recent post is displayed on the front page, and you can navigate forward and backward between posts using next/previous links. The archives page can also be viewed by month.

The second way that Linda will be able to organize her photos is through the use of categories. These categories will be large "buckets" that will help to group her images by type. So, she might end up with categories like Family, Nature, Holidays, and so on. These focus more on the type of image than on the actual content of the image.

The third way is by using tags. Linda will use tags to describe the contents of the image. So, if an image is of Mike, Ben, and Ryan during Thanksgiving, she might tag it with "Mike, Ben, Ryan, Thanksgiving". In the archives, visitors can browse by tag to see, for example, every image tagged with Ben's name.

Finally, I used the In Series plugin to give her the ability to add images to a specific series (called a Set on the site). The other three organizing methods are open-ended, meaning that the Family category will expand with every new post categorized as such. Not so with sets. Each set will only contain images specifically assigned to the set, and sets will be very specific. For example, there might be a Thanksgiving tag that will show images from 2008, 2009, and so on, but she might also have a Thanksgiving 2008 set that will only contain images from that one specific event. If a specific image is in a set, there is a link below it that says which set it belongs to. Clicking on this link expands a "Table of Contents" list that links to all of the other images in the set. You can also navigate to next/previous images within the set. The Archives page also has a dynamic list of all sets available on the site.

This has been a really fun project for me. I've enjoyed having to re-think the way that the content is presented and organized, and it's been a unique challenge to keep the site as simple as possible so Linda can easily use the without any complicated coding, etc.

If you don't mind, I'm sure she'd appreciate it if you stopped by the site and left a comment. I would also appreciate any feedback or ideas you might have, or any bugs that you find on the site.