The Launch of JulieMayDesigns.com

May 15, 2007

Technologies Used: Photoshop, XHTML, CSS, PHP, Textpattern and Paypal

Julie May is an independent artist who specializes in nature themed prints and handmade glass jewelry. I had the privilege of developing her website in order to showcase and sell her work.

I didn’t want her site to look like any other site on the web, and while that’s a very ambitious goal on my part I thought the most effective way to meet that goal would be to use her work as the main focal point. The general look of her site is based around one of her prints, the rest of the color scheme was set to match that particular work.

Aside from the look of the website the thing I’m most proud of are the image galleries. I knew that someday Julie would take over the upkeep of her website and I wanted to make it fairly easy for her to add and delete content. While Textpattern will take care of the written side of things I needed to carry that flexibility over to the galleries. In order to meet that goal I wrote a PHP script that looks through the thumbnail gallery of a particular type of art and then generates the gallery based on the contents of the directory. Julie then only has to add or delete an image to automatically update the item list.

Once the galleries were automated I wrote the PHP script that would be placed in each individual page on the site, the script would read its own filename and then generate all the dynamic content needed for that page itself. It even handles the Paypal purchasing mechanism.

There you have it, juliemaydesigns.com

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