Desert Web Designs Blog

Desert Web Designs is pleased to announce the launch of our latest site:

AllOutdoorsPhotography.com

The Site

AllOutdoorsPhotography.com is an online photo gallery displaying the photographs of Mesa, AZ photographer Gus Koernig. Gus’s portfolio features photographs from around the United States, including Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Carolina, and more, as well as Australia and New Zealand. AllOutdoorsPhotography.com focuses on capturing the beauty of the world that we live, from Mountains to Streams, Waterfalls to Seascapes, Sunrises and Sunsets to Cityscapes, these images will take your breath away. All photos on the site are available for sale with options of a print only or a beautiful museum-style mounting for easy display. All photos come hand-signed by the photographer.

The Design

Our design process for AllOutdoorsPhotography.com started a little different than most. First off, Gus was fairly open to the design of the site and didn’t really have anything in particular in mind with regards to the layout/design of the site. This left us not only with an option to experiment, but also didn’t give us a lot of direction to start with either. The ultimate goal of the site was to display the images in a gallery format with the implementation of a shopping cart functionality to allow for the purchase of the photos.

We started out by coming up with a number of different layout ideas in a process called “wireframing.” Wireframing involves creating

“black-and-white diagrams that illustrate blocks of content, navigation, or functionality…used as a tool to communicate content and structure without the distractions of color and imagery.”

Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke

Here’s an example of some of our wireframes

With a layout selected by Gus, we set forth on creating our website comps. The comps were the basic structure and layout of the site as actual web pages for Gus to get a feel for how the selected wireframe would translate to an actual working web site. The comps were designed in basic HTML and CSS and, once approved by Gus, were very easy to convert into PHP by taking our duplicate content (page headers, footers, and navigation bars) and copying them into a PHP include file. This took care of the majority of the site

The remainder (and bulk) of the site involved displaying the photos from stored database information and creating the shopping cart. By storing the image information in a database, it allows Gus to login to the CMS we created for him to upload new photos, remove existing, change prices, on his own. It also cuts down on the amount of code required for each page of the site. From there, it was simply a matter of creating the shopping cart (which is not as easy as I’m making it sound) for purchasing the orders. There are a lot of caveats to creating a custom shopping cart and, as a designer/developer, you need to make sure that all of those are covered. I won’t cover those here, but let’s just say that the attention to detail is a high priority and can make or break a custom shopping cart. For more information about creating shopping carts, I recommend Constructing Usable Shopping Carts by Clifton Evans, Jody Kerr, and Jon Stephens

All in all, the site for AllOutdoorsPhotography.com took us approximately 45 hours to complete and included the following services:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• AJAX
• MySQL
• Flash
• Custom Shopping Cart
• Custom CMS
• Logo Design

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Site Launches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.