Daniel Durrans, Web Systems Developer and Internet Consultant
Daniel Durrans, Web Systems Developer and Internet Consultant
Planners International Events manage artists as well as organising art related events. They also help artists to sell paintings and prints to the public through exhibitions at galleries, gala dinners, and through the company website.
Planners International has had a website for a number of years. The design was beginning to look dated and the content was in need of an update.
Redesign the Planners International website to give it a more modern and clean look and feel.
Planners International wanted to show potential customers the range of artwork that they had for sale but were not keen, at this time, to offer a shopping basket facility. This was probably a wise move since the artwork isn't really an off-the-shelf product.
It was important for the site to incorporate all artwork that was for sale as well as being able to announce exhibitions and other events.
I used a new technique with this website to help subtly highlight the images of paintings and prints that were for sale. The effect is to place a small drop shadow on each image without altering the original image file.
This was achieved using a style sheet to show a shadow graphic on the bottom and right hand side of each image. The graphic was a grey shadow that faded to the white background of the page. A border was then placed around the image with a slight padding so as not to detract from the picture.
Due to budgets it was decided that implementing a full relational database driven website would be too costly at the present time. However it was still necessary to be able to quickly add and remove paintings from the website. I therefore used PHP Objects to store information about each image. I then added objects into various arrays which I then included into the necessary pages. The pages then dynamically generated various views onto the underlying data structure.
Due to the nature of the website it was always going to have high bandwidth requirements. By default the output from PHP scripts does not send any HTTP headers that are helpful to caching. I started to experiment and initially tried just adding an Expires header to each page. The problem with this was that if I did any updates to the website then people would use the cached copy for up to, in this case, three days before they received the new copy. I therefore changed my methodology and started using a Last-modified. This allowed the browser to check with the server if the page had been modified. The site feels a lot faster to the user now.