Andreea Sanduloiu Photography

I guess it was September when a friend, Andreea Sanduloiu, asked me if I could develop for her a website. She had (and still has) a blog on Blogspot, but she wanted something personal, an online photography portfolio.

Sure I have agreed! All she had to do was to visit me (we're living far away from each other). I knew her only from the internet, messenger and phone. After a week she came to my place, and I thought she deserves a present. So my present for her was the website with domain, hosting, design, developing, etc.

The work on the site started only later, as I was very busy at that moment. Played with a few CMS's and galleries first, then finally I have decided what backend I was going to install on her website. My option again was MODx CMS and Gallery2. Some of the people I've asked to recommend me something haven't agreed with these, as MODx seems quite hard to learn for many, but I had no problem as I use it on my homepage too, so I'm familiar with it. Everyone had a bad opinion about Gallery2 as it's overblown, honestly I didn't liked it too much either. But...if you don't use all the plugins and all the bundled features, it's good. And I guess there's no other free gallery with so many useful things and that powerful.

Andreea wanted a very simple design, in black and with something red as well as a simple handwritten logo. That's all she said. The first design had some little things here and there, some flowers, tattoos but she didn't wanted anything. Just some text and the photos. I was looking for some more, at least one or two Javascript effects. As I am a big fan of Prototype and Script.aculo.us, I have made the semi-transparent thumbnails, added an accordion and Lightbox2, but it was way to slow. So I switched to Mootools and Slimbox, everything is running much faster now.

This is what came out, there are some little management things to do, but as a visitor everything should be fine. The markup is clean and valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, everything styled with valid CSS 2 and some more little extra things added with Javascript that degrades well if turned off. Don't tell me, I know, there is a table in the gallery markup but I used as it should be used...to make the output for tabulator data and I see these thumbnails as data. Otherwise I would have shown one or two only. Accessibility and usability should be also fine.

Andreea Sanduloiu Photography (www.andreeasanduloiu.ro)

I hope you like it, and if you don't like the site you'll like the photos so pay her a visit!