Thread: Web Site Layout?

One of my friends is looking to make a website for his small Photography Business and wants me to help. What do you suggest is the easiest way to go about this? I would love something with a PHP front end where he could manage it and add albums himself. I really need something i can set up for him and leave him alone with it and he can update it him self what would be the best way to go about this?

The absolute best way to go about it is to code the website by yourself. That is, design the front-end and back-end completely from scratch. That's what I'm doing for an organization I'm a part of.

Other than that, I would suggest a Tumblr-based website if your friend needs to be able to easily upload pics and do stuff by himself. There are tons of photography-based layouts out there for Tumblr; find one you'd think he would like, apply it, and show him how easy it is to upload photos. I think he can even use a custom domain name (myphotos.com).

I agree whit the post above.

Having a small photography website hes likely to want some SEO (google it if you dont know it) to make sure people find him on google. Find out what hes after, maybe making him a layout in photoshop he can agree on before you start, to avoid changing things late in your work process. Make sure he makes hes thoughts very clear before you start anything because the process of making a site can get complicated if you have to deal whit a customer that changes hes mind easily.

I asume you can code in PHP, so custimize him a simple layout on the admin end, where he can add a new photo "class" and then add to that gallery as he sees fit.

Hes a friend but in my openion its very importent to find out what he realy want like i said before. If you dont you can end up in a situation were the person suddenly get new ideas (more work) or claims he had told you to make something diffrent(also more work).

But good luck :)
CARL

I'll have to disagree with the above posts.

If you want an easy to use system for him, and not much coding work for you I would go with a CMS such as Joomla or Drupal. It will cover the login and security needs, and both have support for ecommerce platforms so if he wants to sell he can integrate a cart without much issue. They also have SEO, uploading, gallery and every other type of addon you could possibly want (for joomla anyways)
Rolling your own website is dangerous if you don't know how to code properly. With the amount of script kiddies running around and automated fuzzers, you would likely just waste time and get hacked.

A CMS is the best option yes.

I'd suggest Drupal

What I usually do though Is code the website in HTML and CSS manually, then when you are happy with it you can use a CMS like CushyCMS then you just add the class "editable" to the divs you want to be able to change, then you can use CushyCMS backend to edit them.

If a photo gallery is what you need then yes use Drupal with gallery plugin.
Trying to code a full backend for something like this is advanced PHP and SQL (or another DataBase language) and would need a lot of time and experience to be able to do it.

As far as design goes I definitely agree with Carl. Get your friend to give you some kind of mock-up or something before you even start. As a photographer he's probably a creative person and he should have a good idea of what he wants his website to look like.

I highly recommend adobe illustrator for layout mock-ups. It's great because you just layout shapes with borders and text on top.. much like css/html. I recently did my girlfriend's website (she's a fashion designer) and I made her draw what she wanted in illustrator. The design looks a thousand times better than anything I could have come up with on my own.

This plugin basically aliases one of the built-in PHP functions. It does not have any additional parameters,Projects install these components on their server, and add their own PHP scripts to generate, show, and handle tasks.

Originally Posted by candye

This plugin basically aliases one of the built-in PHP functions. It does not have any additional parameters,Projects install these components on their server, and add their own PHP scripts to generate, show, and handle tasks.

What plugin?

hello. I suggest WordPress with a customized theme. It's great. There are a lot of plugins maybe fits on your need. WordPress it's nice and friendly, easy to manage with fresh look in the back end. You can make your own plugins, or implement what you want in your themes using JQuery or other nice java scripts. You should try it. Bye