URL: http://www.tobymurphy.com

The brief was for a site that loads as fast as possible and is as easy as possible to update. The photographer wants to keep his portfolio as up-to-date as possible, but spend as little time as possible doing so. The photographer is based in SA where internet speeds are generally on the slower side so this also needs consideration.

Frontend:
We agreed on an image size that was big enough to do justice to the photographer’s work while not taking too long to load. The photographer also decided that he was unlikely to want more than approximately twenty images in any section. As such, we opted to load all images on page load meaning no ‘loading’ bars once the user begins navigation. Images were added into an unordered list with custom jQuery written to handle scrolling between them. The jQuery tinycarousel plugin was used for the thumbnail scroller with some customisation added to handle the varying widths of the thumbnails. Finally, all scripts were compressed and the wp-super-cache plugin was added to further increase site speed.

Backend:
We kept the backend to a bare-minimum by using post title, post content and adding support for featured images. The photographer simply uploads his shot via the featured image box, adds a title and a one line description and assigns to one of his categories. For adding multiple images, he can upload images via the Media Manager. We also made use of the brilliant new custom menu function in WordPress to add an easy to update menu. Finally, the Contact Form 7 plugin was added for the Contact page.