BJØRN CHRISTIANSEN | Photographer

Building a web based Portfolio by Bjørn Christiansen

Building a web based Portfolio by Bjørn Christiansen

Building a web based Portfolio by Bjørn Christiansen

A good friend of mine, Sondre Nymoen, recommended me to create an online portfolio in addition to the book edition I go around applying for jobs. Good tips, I thought, and put the brain into a extensive thinking process. It has been a while since I have actively worked to develop a website, so it took some time just searching around for information about how different things could be done and for keeping me updated on the code within the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Not only were I to develop a framework for how the page should behave in form of functionality, it also had to look good and provide a good user experience to captivate a possible visitor. There are a lot of consideration I have had to deal with me when I designed websites before. For example, I worked on a project called the International Conference of Ethiopian Studies 2007 at NTNU, where one of the demands was that the page should be adapted to Ethiopia standards in form of download speeds. In 2006 – 2007 were Ethiopia, today, a developing country where broadband was not very well developed. The bottom line was that each page in the site had to be no greater than 20KB per page, which meant much text and few images for optimizing speeds. Another demand was the screen resolution for the target group this project applied. The requirements from the client was to keep me in 800×600 pixels, which in reality meant a maximum around 768 pixels in width. The user experience of the side was also important, it had to be recognizable in relation to navigation and update of the webmasters.

Requirements for the site then, as now I had in mind when I set to develop the new portfolios my Sunday and Monday. I aimed to make each page as small in kilobyte size as possible, but taking into consideration that there is a photo portfolio, so I had to ease the some of the requirements in that to see the pictures on the Internet in the respective size and with the respective resolution must reflect the image files will also be quite large in file size. Reason being is that my target group this time aren’t scientists with regard to Ethiopia, which initially has an interest in my portfolio, but feel free to clients and other photographers with much faster internet access than a dial-up modem.

I’ve also realized that the world has gone a step further in terms of screen resolutions. Since I first posted the google analytics to the statistics on this wordpress blog, only 0.18% run a resolution equivalent to 800×600, a resolution that ends up on a 28th place in my stats. In 14th place resolution is 768×1024 with 0.78% and a 10th place is 320×480 with 1.88% who does not even account for more than 3% of all visits to online my page. For those who do not understand any of these numbers as the first number indicates the width of the resolution of the screen visitors. I have the feeling that the tens place is due to multiple use mobile phones when they are surfing. To create something that as many visitors as possible will be able to watch you should stay within these limits so that the visitor don’t need to scroll both horizontally and vertically to see the content. But for me to get with me the last 3% of users, I took some simple design measures that I have seen a number of web-based portfolio do, converting from vertical to horizontal scrolling. Maybe it’s a more comfortable way to see pictures of in relation to that in western countries read from left to right and can take the contents horizontally.
Some technical challenges were there in order for me to convert to this way designing a platform. I had to take into account that people still wanted to use the scroll wheel to navigate along the side and possibly having to move the mouse very far each time you would get to the last picture in the gallery. I found some JavaScript that worked relatively smoothly. Most are based on jQuery, frameworks I’m not very familiar with, but have an understanding that is very prevalent within the web nowadays. I would also add a little security that people realized that it was horizontal content and did some graphic grip and let the horizontal arrows in every direction. These arrows could pushed and the content, in this case the gallery, would jumped in the direction of the arrow shown.

For the visitor would be having to scroll all the way back to start to navigate to the next category, I let the menu be fixed on the screen while scrolled across. This function is started acting very badly when I tested it on my android phone this morning, but on the other hand I can not account for everything. The menu has a value of opacity: 0.8; which means that it has a transparency of 20%. This I have done only as a design grip and separate me from the rest of the portfolio with horizontal scrolling.

In addition to having created categories of images I have photographed, I have also created a separate category with videos and animations I have made.

Basically, I have tried to keep to the requirements and specifications I have always designed websites with, kept things clean, fast and easy with an option for most visitors to see the page as it originally intended to be seen. I have also tried to keep me within the W3 standard for HTML 4.01 Transitional Loose. Since I wanted the menu transparent, I have had sacrifices an error, the one line of code, opacity, CSS-stylesheet. I hope that the design is so intuitive that I do not have to go into detail what I have done. But there are some questions, feedback or the like, do not hesitate to contact me.

If you didn’t find the portfolio, click here: www.bj0rn.net