NEED someone to Customize!

[MandyFairfield]

I am making this website.

http://www.jared-goldstein.com

I need a gallery to match the style of gallery I had started on (Click for the personal pics) Because now they decided they want to be able to upload and change. SO I have to stop what I've worked on and use Coppermine.

Can anyone PLEASE customize? Will pay!!!

[Joachim Müller]

please read the sticky thread on this sub-board - it is advisable to give more details, i.e. your budget, what exactly you need to be cutomized and when the customization has to be done. This will make it more likely that people will reply here.

Joachim

[MandyFairfield]

Well Im not sure how much this service really goes for! I'd like to keep it around $50. Need it done in a week, nothing fancy just something that matches the site.

[Joachim Müller]

You will definitely not be able to maintain the looks of your overall design, as the actual content area is way to small to make coppermine actually fit in it without sacrificing readibility, but it should be fairly easy to come up with something similar, just a wider content area. Another workaround would be to put coppermine into an iframe in in your existing content area, but you will have to resize the thumbnails and intermediate size pics into something really small, with only the full size pics opening in a pop-up actually showing something that's worth to be called a photo.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to take the job, just trying to be helpfull.

On a side note: your main navigation can't be accessed at all using mozilla firefox (the site is displayed OK in it though, but what's the use if you can't actually browse it?). I strongly recommend reviewing your existing code to make it at least work with anything else except IE. The blury glow effect can be achieved by other "traditional" means of webdesign (good ol roll-over is fine, as you don't seem to care to much about standards compliance anyway), no need to use proprietary M$ stuff.

Joachim

[MandyFairfield]

Well as you can tell Im rather new at this. Im more into working with Photoshop than I am with Dreamweaver. Thanks for the advice though! I dont understand what you mean about not using rollovers, I was using rollovers. I don't even know what Mozilla Firefox is! Also the design, i.e. the opening page photo on the left and it's style was not my idea. I had this awesome look to the site with a pic where he actually looked bearable to look at and then he goes and demands this pic on his front page.

You seem to really know what you're talking about when it comes to sites, I would love for you to evaluate my personal site and another site I did for a friend if you could. It's always good to have criticism. Email me if you want.

http://www.stex-studio.us/mandy
http://www.michaelmags.com
(I also modified his Coppermine Photo gallery. NO problem.. the only problem Im having now is finding a theme that I can tweak to look remotely close to Jared's site)

I think Im just gonna go the long way around and skip this whole coppermine photo album idea, Im better off just making the album myself.

[Joachim Müller]

I think Im just gonna go the long way around and skip this whole coppermine photo album idea, Im better off just making the album myself.

Does this mean the job offer doesn't apply any more? Let me know, so I can flag this thread as invalid.

The pages you're refering to are nice, especially http://www.stex-studio.us/mandy
The second one uses frames, which is a technique that most designers consider as deprecated, mostly because of the issues most search engines have with it. As the top and left frame don't hold to much grahics, I would consider redoing the pages and including the navigation (with SSI or PHP), will make them look more complete, and please the search engines.

For years, the differences and incompatibilities between browsers have been bothering web designers, with IE being the most important browser (stats differ, depending on who you ask - I'd say 90% IE users, 10% other browsers), but finally there are enough good browsers around that respect web standards (well, more or less ), so most web workers agree that although you can not have beautiful pages, valid code and cross-browser compatibility with one web page, the page should be accessible for users with all kinds of browsers - in some countries, there are even laws on accessibility (imagine users with impaired sight who need to browse your page with a screen reader or other tools). What I'm trying to say: get at least one alternative browser, better two of them to run on your machine and check the looks of your pages from time to time - I recommend Mozilla Firebird and Opera (as you're probably on MS Windows).

I know the dilema very well: there are some who know their way around in web technology (html, JavaScript, CSS, PHP etc.) - call them geeks. There are others who know graphics, vision and artwork - call them designers or artists. Very rarely web workers are equally good in both fields (I tend to see myself in the first category, you probably are in the second one). Although the technology aspect of web pages might not be as interessting for you as design is, you will still have to find some balance between those two aspects, which means in your current situation: get a really good and fast browser (Firefox) and review your pages with it. You won't have to code with plain text editors, but you should be aware that some features the wysiwyg editors offer won't work in all browsers.

Cheers

Joachim

P.S. Da Du laut Deinem Resumé ein bißchen Deutsch sprichst: viel Spaß weiterhin mit Coppermine!

[MandyFairfield]

Hehe, I see you read my resume! Yes I speak a little German.

I have never had anyone critique me in such a constructive way! I feel like i've learned a load out of what you just said! You are such a huge help.. and I thank you so much. 

And I found someone to customize the Coppermine for me through this board.