Functions of Gallery Website Design

The first function of good website design should be to not only engage the interest of its visitors, but also to not frustrate them through poor design so that they will stay and explore further. A well-designed site should have an intuitive menu system for ease of use and navigation. The site's pages should load quickly, no longer than sixty seconds maximum with closer to thirty or less being preferable (except for gallery pages where a slightly longer load-time is to be expected), and the text should be easy to read, in size, type, and color. All pages should have a cohesive quality or theme that ties them together as a single website, but the overall look of the site should also reflect its character.

An effective gallery website should contain categories and subcategories for both ease of navigation and reducing page load-times. It should also use thumbnail images that either open in a new window, frame, or popup, or a history-type system (next and previous buttons) to continue navigating the category, to avoid the frustration of traveling back and forth between images and the image index page. A gallery website should also include comprehensive information about each image such as artist, size, filesize, and date of creation or addition to the site.

deviantART.com is a portfolio website for artists that meets all of these criteria. It contains a wide variety of both categories and deeply-nested subcategories. It uses both thumbnails and the history-type system for navigation that first opens a medium-size high-quality version of the image for quick loading and viewing, that can then be clicked again for the full-size version. deviantART.com also contains a wealth of information about each image including size, filesize, date of addition, and artist commentary.

Reference

Flanders, V. (2007). Web Pages That Suck. Retrieved September 30, 2007, from http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/