I’ve implemented a new feature in the galleries that allows you to scroll though the photographs more rapidly. When viewing a photograph there is now an option to link to the next or previous image from the gallery. This should make viewing galleries a bit more user friendly and less frustrating as there will be no need to return to the gallery thumbnails after viewing each photograph.

This feature is a work in progress and is currently implemented using a database query. I will be re-working this in the future as it doesn’t allow for sorting of the images and isn’t as efficient as it could be. However I wanted to add the feature as soon as possible to make the viewing experience better.

After over a year and a half of development and 26,000 lines of code my new website is online.

The first and most obvious difference is the appearance which I've wanted to update for ages. I've still got some tweaking to do but it's getting close to being 100% valid and cross browser compliant.

Behind the scenes nearly all of the back end code is updated and the database has been totally rebuilt using MS SQL 2005. Most of the front end functionalilty appears the same but the gallery system has been majorly improved, allowing more frequent updates and better information about the photographs.

This is only stage one of my plans and over the coming months I will be developing and adding more features and tweaking the current one to perform better. At the moment speed could be better and I'm looking into that now that the site is properly hosted.

Please take a look around and let me know what you think using the contact form.

Version 1

This current version of the website has had some minor revisions in order to correct its appearance when viewed with IE 7.0. I’ve got the major problems fixed but it’s still not perfect. I’m trying out a few ideas to improve it further but have run into the issue that fixing IE 7 breaks IE 6. I’ve also spent a bit of time testing the contact form as I noticed some errors in my log. All tests have been successful to date so hopefully the problem is resolved.

Version 2

I’ve been continuing my work on the new version of the website and although things are still moving quite slowly I’ve made good progress in a couple of areas. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working on the blog engine, which has been completely re-written after version 1. The main features are the same but the efficiency of the backend is much improved and easier to work with. I’ve also enhanced the layout quite a bit. I’m now starting to add some new features such as the ability to email the blog link to a friend and an RSS feed. The admin side of things has also been changed quite radically to make it easier for me to manage. I’ve also added some usage stats so that I can see which blogs are most popular.

I’m still weighing up the usefulness of implementing a comments system for the blog. While it would be kind of cool I don’t think its use will really warrant spending the time to build it. Most of my blogs are informational or news based items and I can’t imagine many comments being left. I may consider adding this after the initial release if it looks like it may be used.

Around everything else I'm still finding small pockets of time to work on the new version of this website. I'm trying to break it down into manageable elements as the project as a whole is very complex. The tricky part is that I'm trying to include a lot of new features all at once and while implementing them slowly in stages may seem easier they all require other elements to be in place for each of them to work properly.

One of the main improvements will be a gallery system that allows me to bulk upload and more easily manage my photographs so that I can include my motorsports photographs on my main website. I'm currently working on the underlying database structure for this section and the administration pages for creating and maintaining motorsports events. By constructing my own database I will be able to include additional photograph info such as driver names to make the images much easier to search.

I have finally worked out the problem preventing some visitors from leaving messages via the contact form and have put a fix in place that should correct the issue. If you used the contact form in the last few months and kept recieving an error I appologise. Please do try again using the modified form as it'll be a good test of my changes.

While correcting the contact me page I also corrected some issues that appeared during the conversion to the .NET 2.0 framework. These may have load times on some pages and also correct some display problems that presented themselves in Internet Explorer.

Please do contact me if you experience any problems while viewing the site.

Also I believe that for some reason some of the messages I am sending are being marked as spam. I'm not sure why this is exactly but if you contact me via the contact form please keep an eye on your junk email / spam folders as my reply to you may end up there.

I discovered yesturday that this website was having some major problems due to a change made by the hosting company. All of the data driven pages were failing and the homepage was missing. It seems my host tightened security for ASP.NET 1.1 which had a big effect on how my website could execute. They've now helped me migrate my site to ASP.NET 2.0 and most of the problems should be fixed. I've noticed a few formatting issues that I will look into when I get a chance, but at least the pages are accessible.

This site has been live for 6 months now and the visitor hits are starting to pick up. When I first started planning this website I had many big ideas of what I wanted to include. In the end I had to make some big cuts in order to get my web presence online more quickly.

The site has been working well, with my personalised blog system and gallery structure providing the basic functionality I had planned for. However there are a number of features that I never coded which I’d still like to add.

Over the next few months I am hoping to find some time to work on version 2.0 of this site. The features that are currently available are basic and in the case of my gallery image upload not really suitable for high volume work. You may have noticed that lack of gallery updates (for which I apologise). This is partly down to a backlog of post processing and bad weather but also down to the long time it takes for me to add each image. Version 2.0 will see the gallery section completely revamped for quicker and easier uploads.

I have written my wish list of features and functionally for v2.0 and it’s very comprehensive (four A4 pages to date). Since this version is stable at the moment I’m going to take my time and try to develop as many of these features into the next version. It will take a while but in the end will result in a website with some exciting functionality (I hope!). I will also be revamping the look of the site in some areas. I expect this work to take at least until the end of the year. Perhaps I can have it online in time for the site’s 1st birthday!

If you have any ideas for features that you feel should be included then please drop me a message and I’ll see if I can work them into the design if they’re not already there. It’s my intention to develop the new version with some scalability so that other photographers can perhaps utilise the website framework for their own sites.

I received an email yesterday informing me that my site had won the PhotoGalaxy Web Awards Highly Commended Website Award. The award indicates that my website has ‘the highest standard in both photographic content and website design’.

I’m now in the running for the Site of the Month Award their highest award category. I’ll let you know how that goes.