Website Notes

First things first!

I'd like to know your observations on the new Prairie Vistas website.

Does the layout and content satisfy the purpose of your visit? Why or why not? What would make it more effective for you? Would a different organization make the galleries more useful to you? Did you find typos, incorrect information, dead-end or confusing navigation?

Please send comments to:
john.morrison@prairievistas.com , or just CLICK HERE.

Why the new site?

Ease of update. The old website was hand-edited HTML, with some PHP code to generate image pages dynamically from a database of my photos. Adding new photos had gotten more and more cumbersome, so updates were infrequent and small. The new site is hosted on SmugMug, and I can add a new photo in just a few minutes.

Larger images. Monitors have grown since the old website was designed. Your current desktop or laptop monitor is probably 1920x1080 pixels. The new website is designed around much larger images.

Mobile devices. Websites today must be viewable on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. A website that does not support viewing on a mobile device is rated lower by search engines.

Dated design. While the old website design was very spartan, I wanted to simplify more. so the gray background is now white, the frames around the images and thumbnails are gone, and all the images make use of whatever screen size is available.

Keywords. When you click on a thumbnail, a large version of that image is displayed in the 'lightbox' view. If you mouse over the image title, the caption will appear, plus several keywords appropriate to the image. If you click on a keyword, the site will present you with all images with that keyword. Disclaimer—I'm still working on keywording the images consistently.

2004-2015
R.I.P.