BloodRobot Portfolio

[BloodRobot]

here's me...

JoeCarr_3D_Artist

[virtualpsycho]

I like your portfolio, the props and environments are really good. The site is really image heavy in its construction and takes a while to load fully. i would suggest making a new site with the construction of it heavily based on scripting and selectable thumbnails for your images. With this above the thumbnails of images having a fat scrolling bar at the top of the website with renders and screenshots of your work. I think this might help.

[BloodRobot]

Hey All,

I completely made over my site to load faster, and look simple. I want to add Lightbox, but i can't get it to work. Anyone know how? I know nothing of web design or code, so speak slowly if you do! i have Dreamweaver CS3.

JoeCarr_3D_Artist

[virtualpsycho]

Joe that looks great. The lightbox worked perfect when I went onto site. The layout is sound(forgive the irish slang), the art is great(no bulls**t), you have done everything right. Well done.

(virtualpsycho)

[JimmY-DigitaL]

When I open it here your entire site shows from left to right, stretching a mile outside my screen and leaving the majority of my screen blank. I don't really know what you did, havent actually looked at the sourcecode but I'm thinking you're using layers maybe.

Try making a design in photoshop, about 1000 pixels wide, just make it look good. Then start in dreamweaver, edit the page properties to match the background color and customize the colors of your text and links. Then add a table, make it fixxed at 1000 pixels wide like your design, and try to figure out how many rows and columns you need.

Typically you want a row for the banner, another row for a horizontal menu another row for your content and maybe an additional row to close everything of. For columns you could probably do with 3, so that you have a small space, like 30 pixels, on both the left and right and 940 pixels in the center column. Be sure to align the table to the centre (not its content, but the table itself).

Now back to your photoshop design and decide where you want to place slices. You need to slice it exactly like your table layout (your table layout should be based on your design really). If you set up you table like described above you're gonna end up with (4 rows x 3 columns) 12 slices. Save each individually as jpg by choosing save for web from the file menu. A quality of 80 always worked fine for me. Copy these files to your website's folder.

Back to dreamweaver, use the corresponding images for each cell as background image. Adjust the 12 cells to match the size of the corresponding images exactly, except those that need to scale (the main content row). A little trick is that background images tile automatically, so for cells that might be stretched (typically those in your main content row) you can do with a background image thats only 1 pixel high.

That should give you a basic setup, add menu items, text and images and it should be ok. Adding lightbox is probably as easy as downloading the *.js file, adding it in your websites folder, then add the first code line in your html code within the <header> and </header> and the second code wherever you want the lightbox tool to be placed.

There's a lot more to and many different ways of building a website but I think this will at least get the job done.

[virtualpsycho]

you have just ticked all the necessary boxes;

- you defined what job you wanted clearly, perfect.
- the quality art is seen is as soon as the page opens
- the contact details and resume are seen as soon as possible also but not intruding on the art shots, nice!

I have suggestion that will seriously help you in presentation end of things and avoiding frustrating potential employers while navigating your site. You see the divided sections you have for the different types of works (environments, models, wips)..... GET RID OF THE SECTIONING OF THESE!!!!

Have it done progressively from top to bottom in order of importance with no labels for section or anything. Just let them flow into each other with a hidden structure. Obviously ( env's then models then wips ) you know this yourself. But this presentation style is the more favoured layout style by employers. They hate sectioning of work for some reason. Alot of them say that its "frustrating".

[virtualpsycho]

If you want a easy to start way to make a portfolio site then try synthasite. I have used it and I was amazed by its ease. Its perfect for a start up portfolio site.

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[BloodRobot]

First off, thanks a bunch guys (Virtualpsycho and Jimmy-Digital),

Well i got the Lightbox to work, and I'm pretty happy with the site now. Sliced up a bunch of images so it should load pretty quick now. Learning as I go.

[JimmY-DigitaL]

Yeah, that is looking a lot better. Good luck with it.

Edit: Ooh wait, it's not working yet. I was at my girlfriend's place when I checked it for the first time, it wasn't working there, when I checked at home it did work so I figured you got it working. Untill I checked with internet explorer. Im using Firefox at home and in there the website works ok, but in internet explorer things get messed up. I checked your source and you have things called 'area', I don't know those but I'm pretty sure they're the problem. They're probably interpretted differently by different browsers. You should stay clear from using frames, layers and these so called area's. Tables is the way to go in my opinion.

[nfollmer]

If your using PS, I never use the damn slice tool. Seems to be a pain in the ass! I create guidelines and use them to just select areas of my sites and save them out (using save for web mind you ). If you don't know how to create a guideline, start your cursor in your rules, click, and drag, you should get a (bluish green by default) line. This may not be the best way to do it, but I feel you get more control over everything.