This site is an experiment for us, and for you.
For the past three-and-a-half years, I have spent a good portion of my life here at Contact Photo Arts. Not that I have minded, not at all, it is very pleasant around here. I have learned multitudes, about photography, people, and business as a whole. I've also made some friends along the way. There is such a good energy here, and that is why I have chosen to work on projects such as this site.
The project
More recently, Bill Wilby, our Creative Director, has been expanding our online business across Canada and the rest of the world, allowing us to be able to spread that energy as far as we can. This site is the next step in that cycle, the sharing of knowledge and of ideas. We hope to foster intelligent, purposeful discussion, and provide a progressive arena for the photography community to dabble in art, technique and equipment set-up.
All of the content on this site is managed by our users, we allow them to upload and host their photos with us, and share information in the form of articles.
During our 'idea phase' we discovered that while forums, mailing lists, and message boards can be a great place to seek information, they sometimes focus more on the medium of discussion rather than the content itself. This can get slightly frustrating on the long term. Our site was designed more like a magazine or a newspaper, with less dialogue and more thoughtfully-posted information. We require the application of new members.
Design
Personally, this site is very different for me, as my style could typically be described with phrases like perfectionism or function follows form, but I realized early on in this project that if everything I did was like that, then none of it would ever get used. As such, this site is not perfect, far from it actually, but whether or not anyone will notice that minor revisions I make down the road is in question. Please, contact me if you have any suggestions.
The site employs a variety of technologies and brings them together to create something nice. We tried to pick an interface that was basic and pleasing. This site uses the following technologies:
- Prototype for DOM manipulation and AJAX
- script.aculo.us for effects and in-place editing
- Livepipe UI for interface controls
- Markdown for formatting (partially implemented)
- JumpLoader for uploads
- ImageMagick for image resizing, etc.
- PHP for server-side handling
- MySQL for database storage
Code
XHTML is used for content and CSS is used for styling. JavaScript facilitates the interactivity of the site, and unfortunately, is required. PHP is used to manipulate the data, and MySQL stores it. At last count, this software was composed of 14435 lines of code.
I hope you enjoy using the site!
— Designer and consulant, Max Milaney.
Wednesday, 27th August, 2008
