And here it is, finished, after hours of poring over Mr Law's MacBook (sorry Mike) at his studio when I could have been asking him questions about photography. This was a project that escalated in ways that I didn't imagine before - suddenly problems were cropping up all over the place and I tried to solve them using stop-gap measures - which caused problems elsewhere. Kind of like trying to squish a large plushie into a small container - you push one bit in and somewhere else something else pops back out. The only solution was to let out some of the foam - which I did by tidying my CSS file (which I wrote in order of my train of thought - not always the best way to do it!). Plus making about 40 gallery pages without Javascript was a pain, to say the least.

I wasn’t really given a design brief for this – it was freestyle for me. All I had to do was make a better site than his old site: [link] . I chose quite a minimalist design, to allow the photos to shine. This site wasn’t particularly difficult to code, but I did learn a few new techniques. Imagine my ecstasy when I finally knew how to position things absolutely. I made some use of Javascript, for instance the gallery previews are switching. Originally the panorama on the front page was going to be larger and scrollable with Javascript, but that didn’t go so well so I allowed the browser to scale it as it saw fit. This works very well in all browsers other than IE, and on IE the aliasing isn’t too bad.

This is the first site I’ve made for a commercial purpose (even though I’m doing it pro bono) and so I tried my best to make it look OK on most major resolutions, though on 1024x768 it will look a bit cramped, and on full HD it may look a bit small, but they should all be viewable. At any rate, the landscape photos should be viewable in one go … Similarly I tested the site on IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari (newest versions) – cue sessions of hair-tearing as one browser out of 4 misbehaved. I’m still really proud of the result and so please visit the site (and call Mr Law if you’re in Hong Kong and want pretty damn good photos taken at a reasonable price).

Through the development of this site ~blland helped me a great deal. He basically coded all the Javascript for me (the gallery page), and helped with resolution testing and other debugging. He even helped on usability, so the site should be really intuitive.

Anyway, thanks for reading, here is the link to the site:

Peter Law Studio

Photos are copyright Peter Law Studio.

Please also see the site in development and in its first interation.

Edit: In order to make the site more easily update-able I got ~blland to write me some Javascript code which I found miraculous but was to him routine, to instead place the gallery thumbnails on the Gallery page, instead of individually on each page. It's supposedly some kind of "loop" routine. There's now no need to update the thumbnail list on each page, and I think the site is more accessible too, since, moving from the Home page, the user can go to any photo he wants with just two clicks instead of three (this applies when he wants to switch galleries too). In this vein I also did away with the sub-gallery index on each page (it's still there, I just applied "display: none;" in the CSS) so adding a whole new sub-gallery (Sports or something) will be easier. Plus I don't have to manually give a id="current" (the orange highlighting) for the subgalleries (you'll see what I mean if you look at the old site).

Mr Law came to the quite reasonable conclusion that the panorama of the sushi restaurant on his front page gave the impression that it was the website of a sushi restaurant ... So he made a banner of his own, which is now on the front page. He didn't keep the PSD so I couldn't change the gradient in the background to gray-orange like the rest of the site ... So I made my own montage and put it here. In practice it would be draggable to view all the images; it is around 4k pixels wide.