If you’re a photographer, architect, artist, graphic designer, or any type of creative professional who has a body of work to display, getting an image gallery for your website can be a daunting task. Not because there aren’t many choices – on the contrary, there are so many that you may find a hard time choosing!
Here are some of the many creative ways you can present imagery on your site.
- The ‘generic’ portfolio: rows of images are familiar and can be styled in many ways from simple to fancy. You can typically create all the categories you need and split images among them. There are many different scripts, plugins and software tools that can make managing this type of gallery easy; others require a little knowledge of HTML.
- Slideshows: fade one image into another in a space with defined height and width. Many slideshow scripts have fancy transitions beyond the basic fade and you can add as many images as you like. Slideshows are good for home pages or other pages within your site. View an example of a slideshow.
- Sliders: there are many types of content sliders out there. These display images (or any other content) in a containing box of defined height and width. They’re more interactive than the typical slideshow; depending on the script/plugin a visitor can scroll through content using previous/next controls, by clicking on the current image, or by clicking on a set of text links, graphic links, dots or numbers representing each image in the slider’s set. Sliders also can have a variety of fancy transition effects. Sliders are great for home pages – Red Kite has one.
- Thumbnails and lightboxes: you can enhance a thumbnail gallery, often used on a blog post, with an interactive lightbox effect. Clicking or hovering on a thumbnail causes the screen to grey out and your image to show up large and bright in the middle of the screen. Most lightboxes allow the visitor to scroll through each image with previous/next buttons without leaving the lightbox popup. Here’s an example of a thumbnail mini-gallery.
Other image tools include Flash photo stacks and portfolios, Polaroid galleries – there are dozens of ways to show off your work. Contact us and we can show you how to more effectively display the best of your work!
