Overview
This portfolio site showcases the gallery of photos and services for Photographer Nicole Boughton. It is intended as a place for potential clients to view her portfolio and for current clients to purchase images.
Design
Like most commercial photography websites, this portfolio site is 100% Flash. All the functions and animations are hand coded in Actionscript 3.0. The Tweenlite/Tweenmax animation library is leveraged to increase the performance of the animations. The site animations include an example of a hand coded particle generator on the opening image and an animated line in the menu coded to follow the mouse position on the menu and dynamically grow or shrink with the size of the menu item.
The structure uses external SWF files called into the main file. By modularizing the site, loading times are reduced and the site is able to expand as new photos or other content is added.
The Photo galleries leverage an external XML file to access and display the thumbnails, main photos and album titles in the drop down menu. When new photos are introduced, all the elements are dynamically updated inside the Flash File when changes are made to a single to XML file. This significantly reduces content update time and maintenance.
If a section needs to be modified or deleted, the rest of the site remains intact. New content can be swapped out easily without changing other content areas.
The client contact me to give her site a complete redesign using current standards, responsive design and HTML 5. Based on the WordPress framework, the new site has a clean and minimalist UI so the content of the photos are front and center for the user to navigate through. Further, the site is 100% responsive and leverages a drag and drop functionality on the back end, making updates and changes to the overall layout a breeze for the client to execute without any technical knowledge.