Philiphorton.co.uk
A few years ago I quickely put together a website for a good friend of mine who is a fantastic artist. I look back at that site now and although he still loves it, I knew that I could do better, and so every time I had a few spare minutes in between projects and work I'd work a bit more on an improved site. One of the major changes that I wanted to make was to the admin area so that it was easier for Phil to update his website. When I'd created his site originally I had only just created an exceptionally simplistic CMS. The only problem with that was that it has a lot of manual entry to get this loaded, like remember image names and having to add each image to the gallery seperatly.
On the original site, one of the main features was the home page. Three big images that show the most recent gallery that has been added. If a new gallery get's added then one of the images get's replaced by the new gallery image. I wanted to keep this, but to slightly tone it down a bit by making them a smaller but still the focus of the home page. With the new site I also wanted to add some text, something that welcomes you to the site pointing you to the pages on the site as there aren't that many, so as well as the main links at the top, you have them much bigger down the bottom of the home page so that they stand out.
The contact page had one change that I wanted to make, that was to use reCAPTCHA on the site instead of the old captcha that I had been using as this worked against some but not all bots. One of the other major changes though came on the gallery pages. Previously Phil had to make thumbnails of every image that he uploaded and then in the admin section he had to enter in details of the image and the respective thumbnail and what gallery this was for. Now, all that needs to be done is to add a gallery and select the folder that the images will go into. With some lovely PHP and CSS the images of that folder are automatically pulled in and thumbnails are created. Basically, all Phil needs to do is upload his images into a folder, it's as simple as that.