Portfolio – http://www.tonyeckersley.com – is live

New website is live, originally uploaded by tony eckersley.

It’s been a long time coming, but I am proud to announce the launch of my photography portfolio site.

I have spent the past few months researching various professional photographers sites, using resources like the photographers I follow on twitter, links from great photographers like Chase Jarvis, Vincent LaForet and Zack Arias, and a great section in PDN’s Photo Annual 2009. In the May 2009 issue, there are some great examples of successful websites of photographers that gave me great insight on how I could display some of my work to a wider audience, creating a captivating and interesting environment for people to browse different elements of my portfolio.

One common theme on most photographers website is the predominant use of Flash. I do enjoy flash (at times), but I, as a web designer, try to stay away from Flash. I know that google can now crawl Flash sites pretty well, so SEO is no excuse, however I find that usability, accessibility and loading times can be severely limited, and I was trained to keep this in mind. On the flip-side, flash sites have that… that something. Something that can grab you and really dominate your visual senses making sure you remember what you have just viewed. I guess it’s the smooth transitions, or nice pop-ups and roll overs that make these sites stand out for me. This is of course if the site is done correctly – I do get tired of waiting for big images to load their long transitions when I am flicking through someone’s portfolio. But that’s what’s become so great about new web technologies. Technologies like jQuery (jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML) have really helped sites have great animations, transitions, roll-overs etc, that do not require flash, or the ability to code in flash. Plus it’s incredibly accessible and works pretty well across all browsers. So I decided that would be the scripting I would use for the site to create the kind of environment I had envisioned.

On with designing! I wanted only one page. I never wanted to user to leave this one page, or have to load up a whole new set of pages. I wanted everything accessible from one consistent area. This was one element I took from many Flash sites I had researched and liked. While not ideal for SEO, I like the setting and it worked perfectly for how I wanted the background to work…

Most people who saw my site through the test stages commented first on the changing background graphic. For the longest time I played with simple plain colors, or gradients, but I could not find something I was happy with, something that made the site look different. So, going back on myself, I went to flash. I know, I know, I wanted to avoid this, but I had an idea of an ever changing background images that would be slightly out of focus so not to distract from my portfolio, but yet carry a kind of surreal unique scene. Flash made sense for me a this point as I knew how to easily create a quick loading fully elastic background that would resize at all times to fit the browser window. The biggest challenge was placing Flash as a background. After much research I finally managed to creatively use DIV’s and z-index and w-mode in flash to get this working. I really like how subtle it becomes and carries the content.

The content placement follows all the usual rules of web design to become familiar to the users. Again I made sure that content was loading in to the current page so you would not leave area you first land on – a user experience I really wanted. I then used Coda Slider to control the transitions and load in each image before the user even gets to it so there is very minimal waiting. I also added a simple rollover for a short description about each image. I did not place a thumbnail option, however it is something I am considering for the future. The reason I did not use this feature was that each area of my portfolio had a specific order to each image and I wanted to the user to not navigate past a certain image that would complete the story of each section. I will base this need after further testing on users.

My image selection was based upon my favorite areas of photography. I added some personal projects, some ongoing projects, and services I would like to offer to future clients as I move onto making photography a full time career.

So here it is! Please let me know what you think, or if you find any bugs, or any feedback whatsoever. I look forward to hearing from you! http://www.tonyeckersley.com