Thought on Fullsccreen photography websites?

dinneenp

Hi,
Fullscreen websites are popular these days. I think they work excellently for photography websites as photos get seen in very large size, makes them more dramatic.

Anyone here using a fullscreen site and what's your thoughts on them?
(I know at the end of the day it's the content that counts but the delivery also matters).
Cheers,
pa.

Farmlife

What's the most economical way of one getting a website like this, i went down the website road a while back but the outcome is an embarrassment

Kenny Logins

Farmlife wrote: »

What's the most economical way of one getting a website like this, i went down the website road a while back but the outcome is an embarrassment

It's a Wordpress theme. So;

Domain € +
Hosting € +
Theme ~€43 (http://themeforest.net/item/flashlight-fullscreen-background-portfolio-theme/616050)

If you're comfortable in jumping in to get it set up and running, that's it.

Farmlife

Iv got the domain and hosting with blacknight and went on to set up joomla and hit a brick wall after that, do you feel that theme is fairly straight forward to use?

Kenny Logins

Yeah. Themes can take a little bit of time to get them configured the way you want, depending on how the particular theme's structure is set up, but generally a couple of hours will do it.

I usually install on my PC at home first, and play round with everything for a while before using a live web server. Instructions here -
http://tentblogger.com/install-wordpress-locally/
(may seem complicated at first, but after a couple of goes you'll do it with your eyes closed).

I spent a weekend wrestling with Joomla, didn't like it at all. I'm sure it has its strengths, but not for me.

dinneenp

You could always download a free Wordpress fullscreen template like Lensa (or many others) and see what it's like.
There's LOADS of fullscreen Wordpress themes out there, just google wordpress fullscreen templates.

Farmlife

Excuse my more than likely stupid question here, but is wordpress an alternative to joomla? Would I just delete my joomla and download wordpress

Kenny Logins

Yep.

(Don't just go and delete the Joomla installation though)

Promac

If it's a standard web hosting package you'll have some form of auto-installer where you pick software from a list. So you could tell the web hosting package to install Wordpress for you. You just point it to a folder such as "/blog" which would appear on your site as "www.mydomain.com/blog"

As part of the install process you'll choose a password for the admin account which will let you use the admin panel that in turn will let you install themes and other plugins.

If you keep Joomla (and any other open source PHP package, including Wordpress) you need to keep them updated absolutely religiously as they are constantly being attacked by hackers. There was a big wordpress hit last week that allowed anyone access to an entire server.

Personally (and with a ton of bias as I'm a software developer) I'd just pay for the web hosting and make my own site from scratch. It's not actually that hard and it's immeasurably more secure.

Promac

dinneenp wrote: »

Hi,
Fullscreen websites are popular these days. I think they work excellently for photography websites as photos get seen in very large size, makes them more dramatic.

Anyone here using a fullscreen site and what's your thoughts on them?
(I know at the end of the day it's the content that counts but the delivery also matters).
Cheers,
pa.

Fullscreen is definitely the way to go. More and more people are using widescreen monitors and TVs to view all their web content and the tablets are wide too when held landscape. The clincher though is having a site that scales well and will handle both portrait and landscape orientations.

The front line in web development currently is using a mixture of html5 and css3 and script to make sites that resize dynamically based on the size of the screen being used so that one single page and stylesheet will view correctly on a 40 inch TV and a phone and a tablet and everything in between. You can do this on Wordpress now too as it'll accept all the same styling as a standard web page.

If you want to have a bash at it look into media queries but you'll probably end up straying into JQuery territory too (which is awesome).

superflyninja

Promac wrote: »

Fullscreen is definitely the way to go. More and more people are using widescreen monitors and TVs to view all their web content and the tablets are wide too when held landscape. The clincher though is having a site that scales well and will handle both portrait and landscape orientations.

The front line in web development currently is using a mixture of html5 and css3 and script to make sites that resize dynamically based on the size of the screen being used so that one single page and stylesheet will view correctly on a 40 inch TV and a phone and a tablet and everything in between. You can do this on Wordpress now too as it'll accept all the same styling as a standard web page.

If you want to have a bash at it look into media queries but you'll probably end up straying into JQuery territory too (which is awesome).

hi! I code java but ive not been exposed much to html. What do you think it would take to code up a full screen site from scratch using wordpress/drupal etc? I saw a nice full screen theme for 45 dolla.....

Promac

Doesn't take much at all actually. Here's one for free:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Untitled Document</title>
</head>

<body>
This is fullscreen.
</body>
</html>

dinneenp

There's several free full screen themes out there.

superflyninja

dinneenp wrote: »

There's several free full screen themes out there.

do they remove all branding though? Like there is no made with wordpress logo or anything?

dinneenp

Lensa is 100% free, link is to the demo.
At the bottom of the screen it says '© 2013 Lensa. All Rights Reserved' but I'd be fairly sure that can be removed in the code.

achtungbarry

I think full screen photography websites look great. What better way to showcase your work than using the whole screen to do so. There are of course some pitfalls such as file size of images used but by using the 'Save for Web' tool in Photoshop, this is easily solved.

The 'Lensa' theme in Wordpress is a fantastic free theme alright with a very clean and simple design. Personally I use 'Digon'. I really like this theme but it took quite a lot of code tweaking to get it looking the way I want it. 'Smart Screen' is also another excellent full screen theme.

Here's mine using the 'Digon' full screen theme:

http://www.barryocarrollphotography.com/

superflyninja

achtungbarry wrote: »

I think full screen photography websites look great. What better way to showcase your work than using the whole screen to do so. There are of course some pitfalls such as file size of images used but by using the 'Save for Web' tool in Photoshop, this is easily solved.

The 'Lensa' theme in Wordpress is a fantastic free theme alright with a very clean and simple design. Personally I use 'Digon'. I really like this theme but it took quite a lot of code tweaking to get it looking the way I want it. 'Smart Screen' is also another excellent full screen theme.

Here's mine using the 'Digon' full screen theme:

http://www.barryocarrollphotography.com/

Nice site! This is mine, using Lensa and is VERY much still under development. Ill have a look at the themes you mention as currently I cant have separate galleries using lensa,that is to be fixed though apparently. What plugin are you using for the shopping cart?

dinneenp

both very nice sites.
@achtungbarry- pages are taking slow for me to load.
What kind of % of sale price do Fine Art America take on prints?

achtungbarry

dinneenp wrote: »

both very nice sites.
@achtungbarry- pages are taking slow for me to load.
What kind of % of sale price do Fine Art America take on prints?

Thanks for that. I'll take a look and see if I can reduce the file sizes a little more.

Fine Art America set a base price for each size print and you simply add on your mark-up. I set about a 40 euro mark up on a 16 inch print and work out the rest from there.You also get a 15% commission on frames. I would highly recommend them. As you can see on my site, you can even embed your web store seamlessly into your own site. I've made a decent number of sales at this stage with very little advertising on my part.

Kenny Logins

Try www.jpegmini.com

superflyninja

@achtungbarry Is it easy to link the fine art america commerce to your site?
(I already have a FAA account)

achtungbarry

superflyninja wrote: »

@achtungbarry Is it easy to link the fine art america commerce to your site?
(I already have a FAA account)

It's very easy. You simply paste the code they provide into a blank page designated as the web store.