February 14, 2011

If you’ve been keeping up with my @sebas_agosta Twitter account lately, you’ve probably noticed that I’m currently creating a brand new custom web design for the Montessori Early Years. You can see the current website design I did about a year ago in my portfolio. As you can see the site already looks out-dated and is clearly not some of my best work.

The new design includes much “softer” and “inviting” colors as well as much better coding on the back end. The site is now completely built using a DIV based layout and CSS. One thing that I was really excited to change was the photo gallery section on the site. The script I used for the first design was very tedious and quite frankly a pain to update. The code I’m using for the photo galleries now is called Lightbox and more specifically Lightbox 2.

Most of you have probably seen some variation of Lightbox online when searching through photos on certain sites. Facebook now uses a form of Lightbox for it’s photo galleries as well as many other mainstream sites. Lightbox is coded using Javascript and CSS and is very simple for even the most beginner web designer to implement on their page. All the information on coding and files for Lightbox can be found on this site.

Lightbox will make your photo galleries much more elegant and simple to navigate. I’d recommend Lightbox for anyone who has thumbnail photos they want expanded when clicked. Give it a try and if you have any questions on it, feel free to comment below!