Exercise 25 Further pages

I decided to make a total of 5 pages, mentioned previously, and had to decide which of my images I would feature on each one.  I thought it was important not to duplicate images on other pages.  One thing I've noticed with Weebly is that WYSIWYG  (what you see is what you get) in that, I imagine, unless you pay for your blog, you get a basic set up with just the pages you see and no parent/child design available so that you can split up your images according to category. For example, I take portraits in colour and black and white and would like to have a Portraits page with sub sections for BW and Colour but can't do it in this basic software.  I'm using Weebly for this exercise as I run this blog in Blogger and a camera club blog in WordPress ( www.lymebayphotographicclub.org) which allows parent/child sections, so I thought I would give Weebly a trial and see how it went.

 

On my Landscape page I created a  2-column picture gallery with 6 images to start with.  One thing you must remember is to click on the word 'Publish' or 'Update' when you have made the slightest change to the page.  Even if you've just added a space or full stop, until you click the orange key on the top right hand corner, your changes would not be made.

 For the Portrait page I used the same layout but kept similar images together, ie, black and white dancers, black and white portraits, then colour work below.  I could have separated the black and white and colour images but at this point decided to go with just one page.  Later I could make the decision to split them into two pages and have a link on the left hand side to show what I've done.

With the digital art page I thought I would do something slightly different, that of having a slideshow which toggled round the images in order.  It's all very simple, just drag the symbol on to the main page area and upload your images.

Here you could see that the main image had moved back to the beginning of the trio of images to show the first image with glowing edges, edited in Photoshop, which gave a different effect.

I've done quite a bit of blogging since I started using it instead of working through the exercises with paper and paste since I started People & Place (my previous module).  It can be very frustrating to create the blog, especially when the images won't go where I want them to go, but there always seems a way round it and if not, I can always refer to the OCA student forum on digital photography for advice.  Someone has always had the same bad experience and can give suggestions on how to overcome the problem.  If all else fails there is always the 'happy engineer' on the blog website ready and willing to offer advice if you have 48 hours to wait for an answer.

I have worked with the Adobe Dreamweaver software when I was working in further education but, whilst it was fairly simple to create the pages, there were always some other aspects that had to be completed before I could upload the pages to the internet.  Blogging is a much simpler way of getting stuff on to the internet, albeit you have to pay for a web address that doesn't include the blog name in the URL.

One thing I feel that you need to do if you run a website, whether it be a properly constructed site or a blog, is to keep it up to date and interesting, unless you have a very static subject.  With my camera club blog, I change the header images weekly, having been out and about scouting around the town and countryside for new images.  I also change the Club News page after every meeting to incorporate the report of the latest meeting and make sure the programme section is kept up to date.  I've had one or two comments that I run a dynamic website which keeps club members well informed about club matters.

The club has quite a large section of old school members who tend to treat it as a Friday night social club so, at present, I have to bow somewhat to their requirements as we build up membership of the  more dedicated photographic type.  Membership, social against technical, is running at 50/50 as against 75/25 for the social side when I first joined. It will take some time but I really feel that we need to attract the more photographically minded type of members to keep the club running.