Website Gallery Planning

The client has provided me with a collection of images to include in the website, these consist of diagrams of the vehicle and previous racing events. Team members photos have not been provided although they are displayed on the teams current website. These shall be used in the team section mainly focusing on the students who are in-charge of the planning, building and development process of the vehicle. 

The images varied from different years mainly 2011 and 2012 they had random labelling most likely the ones provided by the camera they use to take the images therefore some organising needs to be done. Two folders were made, labelled with 2011 and 2012 in order to separate them by year as the car design changes every year. I looked at the dates of each photo to see when they were taken, I then renamed them and placed them in the folder with the corresponding year. These two folders were then placed in the images folder of my project so that i can access them when creating the gallery. 

Initially the gallery was going to consist of links leading to a page dedicated to a different year (2011, 2012 and 2013). It was going to be incorporated  in the drop down menu as I felt it would organise the gallery section and allow users to directly click on the year they are interested in instead of visiting the gallery page. I wanted to gather older images in order to create a timeline of how the vehicles design/colours has changed over the years so instead of just having 2011 and 2012 I would have 2008, 2007 etc... The problem with this technique is that as the years go by more and more pages will be added, this is an element which needs to be avoided in order to not flood the website with unnecessary content. Due to this factor I have decided to keep to one gallery page where the best and latest images will be displayed. 

Originally I was going to use a simple image gallery that places the images as small icons on the page like the example displayed below. 

The problem with this method is that it makes the page look dull and boring, if there are many images to display they will have to be a small size in order to fit them all. Therefore a different approach is needed.  

Sources

W3Schools. (N.D.). CSS Image Gallery. Available: http://www.w3schools.com/css/tryit.asp?filename=trycss_image_gallery. Last accessed 4th March 2013.