Gallegosart.com, ver.7 or so

Well, the new website has successfully launched.

The last version of the site is a few years old. During its lifetime it saw tweaks and improvements. But it was old and really needed to be refreshed rather than try to shoehorn functionality into its structure. So I've been gathering up ideas and finally put them into action. I hope you like it.

Highlights:
1.)The site is now entirely centered. I know, finally. It's still for 1024x768 resolution, however, as it is still the baseline. For reference, my laptop is 1900x1440 resolution so I feel your pain. Still, the site looks alright--even if the images are a little small for that format.
2.)The old site had a flipped Left/Right orientation, with text being right-justified. I'm not sure why I felt strongly about that anymore--like I said, it's been years. This has been reverted to standard.
3.)I added a section for sketches, but you know that already.
4.)Functionality. As introduced in Matt Cavotta's site and recently used in Jim Nelson's, my site will now tell you, for any image, what formats that image can be found in, and link you to them. So if you're viewing a painting, and a print exists, you'll know, without having to back out and drill down another category to see if that print exists.
5.)Click reduction. As with the above, I've tried to reduce clicks to bits of info. Why before did you have to click "back" then choose "large prints" after viewing "small prints?" Because I couldn't code the two together before. Now all prints are on one page, as they should be.
6.)Cross-browser compatibility. The site has been fully tested on Explorer 6+, Firefox, Safari (PC/Mac), Chrome, and Opera. The site functions as intended on all of these. "Enlarge" views do not work on the iPhone since it does not support Flash. If you know of a good non-flash zooming script/widget, let me know.
7.)Just better design. But that's obvious.
8.)Thanks to suggestions by Jon Schindehette, I made a few tweaks including adding contact info right there, at the bottom of every page. If you have a question or want to offer me big bucks for a project, you don't have to hunt for a way to contact me (it was always at top, and still is, via a form--but that's sort of intended for Daydream Graphcis-related stuff).
9.)At Irene Gallo's suggestion I changed my portfolio page. She communicated that Art Directors want even fewer clicks than most people. They don't want to click back, click next thumbnail, etc., to view your portfolio. She likes blog sites where you can scroll all the way down and just see everything in one go. I don't like blog sites as portfolios, but her basic idea makes sense. So my portfolio page is a hybrid--everything is there one one page to scroll through, and there are thumbnail links that you can use to quickly get to each image. If an Art Director wants to drill down further, they'll have to browse like the rest of you. The homepage marquee image now takes you to its portfolio entry if you click it.
10.)Because this site is equally for fans and collectors as it is for Art Directors, I've decided to hide the purchase info of original art when you're just browsing the gallery. I never liked throwing up prices and Cart options to Art Directors as they browsed my gallery. For those that are interested in purchasing art or are curious, a bolded link reveals the price, when available.
11.)Everyday capitalization reappears. I know.
12.)Front page news update improvements, mentioned a few days ago here.

That's it, enjoy! For techie types, you can keep reading; regular folks can skip this next part:

1.)Like I said, non-Flash zooming tech welcome. Zoomify, however, is *incredibly* easy to implement. Perhaps I should query the browser platform, and if it returns an iPhone id, then the site wouldn't advertise the existence of an enlargement they can't see? That's the simplest option.
2.)When Cavotta proposed the cross-linking idea, it was quite obvious. Running your own site, if you did it the old way--with individual html pages for each item, you would just hand-build links back and forth between items. And it would take forever, and require constant updating. It was my first attempt at really attempting to write new functionality, and I managed to do it, mainly utilizing strings passed from page to page so the database pulled the correct information. It was a daunting request--not then knowing much vbScript or understanding databases really at all, how could I get my code to know if other products existed for a given item and deliver those links to you, correctly for each item, while knowing what you're looking at currently so as not to deliver that link, and so on? Simple, in retrospect. Still, it makes for ugly URLs that you aren't inclined to share, and still requires maintaining the updating of those from time to time. Jim Nelson liked the code and so we reused it on his, cleaning it up again. But Jim wanted me to show thumbnails while an image detail was being displayed. Ack. More finagling, but it worked at the expense of an even longer URL for each image.

So when it came time to try it again on my site, I restarted and worked more on the database level first, which I hadn't played with before. I don't run a local test-server because I could never set that up properly and get everything to work, so my database changes are done live, and as a result, are always very conservative tweaks--data updates, not structure changes. My concern was that URL links would break or generate bad information as the status changed for that image, as the links aged. I succeeded in making one page do all the work, back to the absolute minimum URL possible, for instance--if I link an image say, here on the blog, and its status changes, the link will still work in the future (unless I delete an item entirely, which still happens). I'm not showing thumbnails on details pages becauses there's no real estate for it, but now I think I could do so without bloating the URL. Remember, I'm a painter, not a programmer.

3.)One bit of code is still bugging me, but it's a limited case so I'm living without it: The new Daydream Graphics header has drop-down boxes. When an image is enlarged and the Zoomify view appears, while you are in that state if you try to drop-down those boxes they drop behind the enlarged image. You have to close the Zoomify view to see the drop-downs again. Both that drop-down script and the Zoomify exist in layers with position: absolute and z-indexes with proper priorities. But it ain't working. If you're savvy with these sorts of things, you can view the source of the detail.asp page and maybe let me know what stupid thing I'm not doing?