My web page

JCMhouston

I'm just playing with a new web page for my collecting habit, so far I've just put a few of the British pieces on-line. If you get a chance let me know what you think of the way the slide show works. Any constructive criticism on improvements would be welcome.
My site

lordmarcovan

I was hoping to see some pics of your ceramics, too, but I didn't see any. Could be my server here at work is blocking them, or you just haven't added them, yet?

As a relic hunter who sometimes searches on 18th century plantation sites, I developed an interest in ceramics and glass of the period. Of course we only find fragmentary remains, but they help us to date the sites we're on.

JCMhouston

Not there yet lordmarcovan, I'm going to image some of them this weekend and with any luck get them on-line.

AuldFartte

Nice website, JCM

When you click on the thumbnails of US Comm. coins, they don't enlarge too much. Is that just me? The Brit coins enlarge quite well.

JCMhouston

Thanks AuldFartte, the commem images are reduced to 240x240. After I get some of the prints and drawings and the ceramics page built if I have the space I'll put some 360 or 480 dpi images in there. Have to see how much of my gigabytage I use.

percyb

<< <i>Nice website, JCM

When you click on the thumbnails of US Comm. coins, they don't enlarge too much. Is that just me? The Brit coins enlarge quite well. >>



I agree. Very nice website ...the US C's don't yet enlarge, but again, very nice collection and site!!

Iosephus

Nice looking website. I like the layout and the sort of informal discussion you present about your collection.

However, I must say, I'm not a big fan of the Flash slide show. Although it looks kind of cool and works well for what it is, I abhor the use of Flash in any sort of website unless it is necessary (and it almost never is). I find that such implementations are usually clunky and reduce the simplicity of navigation for the site. Also, a bigger problem is that people without Flash cannot view it. For example, on my machine here, IE does not have a Flash plug-in installed, so I had to go open up Firefox (which I installed once just so I could install the Flash plug-in for it so I could view sites with Flash if necessary) to view your site properly.

Other than that, I think it's a really nice job. I enjoy looking through people's collections that they post online and reading about their interests and modus operandi when it comes to collecting. Thanks for sharing.

Edited to add: Just continuing to browse through your site, I noticed the pictures of the ceramics. I found it much more enjoyable to simply be able to scroll through the page to view them rather than using the slide show. Just my personal opinion.

JCMhouston

Thanks Joe, I had thought about just having the coin images like the ceramics page. It just seems like it would get long and unwieldy doesn't it? With obverse and reverse pics on the Commem page I would wind up with around 90 images, 100 when I finish the type set.

Iosephus

I personally don't think that would be too unwieldly. That would assume that you put smaller thumbnail pictures for each coin which then link to a larger image in either the same window or new window. Using some organization (e.g., two or three coin thumbnails per row) could help reduce the length of the page and the necessary scrolling. I personally would find it easier to just scroll down the page viewing the images without waiting for them to stream along the bottom of the slide show if I was interested in viewing just a few images at full size.

If you opened the new image in a separate window (or even in the same window), you could also provide links there to go to the previous and next coins, similar to the arrows on the slide show, so that a viewer could still easily click through the collection without going back and clicking each thumbnail (the way the PCGS registry images work is similar to this, I believe). You could also then easily add some text about each image when the full version is displayed, if you wanted.

Doing this would lose the automatic function of the slide show, which could be useful if someone just wants to sit and view the images as they go by, maybe just stopping on ones of interest. You could probably put something in to automatically redirect to the page with the next image after a certain time, but it would take some effort.

These are my personal feelings about it. There are so many ways to design a webpage and with so many different targeted uses that there's never a single best way to do it, in my opinion.