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I have just converted my website to a virtual representation of a real life image gallery. The images are on walls in themed rooms and the menu is a map of the gallery. It operates like the electronic touch screen maps you get in shopping malls. I don't want to go much further into this idea if it is totally along the wrong sort of lines. Any comments would be very welcome.
Peter
Got to The Site
I admire the idea but unfortunately the execution doesn't do it for me, sorry. It doesn't look very professional, not helped by the spotlights and wouldn't inspire me to buy anything. Once in the gallery the arrows don't work and the only way of getting to the art motion gallery is via the map.
If you want to carry down this route I would recommend your background look more like the theme, that grey is pretty drab and your navigation arrows be thumbnails of the next room, not just arrows.
Also, purchasing images should be a seamless operation from the image you want to purchase, not a separate link. Each image needs full details of sizes and prices.
Sorry if this comes across a bit harsh.
Ian
Adrian - it is still a draft really so i will look at the back button and make it active, thanks
Digicammad - Not at all harsh. The whole point of putting the comment on here was to get comments and constructive criticism. Just not sure whether to persist or to accept it was a bad idea.
Thanks both for the comments
To reinforce your idea of the gallery map, that should probably be on the home page rather than a separate link. It would also pay to make it look less clunky, for example if you imagine how a Cluedo board looks you could use that type of concept. You could even inject a bit of fun by having toilets and a cafe, with appropriate images in there.
digicammad - you are now making me enthused again ! what a dilemma. But thanks for the ideas !!! 
For me it looks like it is aimed at the younger market very much like the touchscreen buttons you get in musiems to engage children, The light grey background does nothing to highlight your images and Does not have a professional feel to it as does the Lights which dominate your initial Viewing, I Feel it cheapens what is excellent content , This is my own opinion and may differ completely to everyone Else's.
For me digicammad summed it up perfectly its a very good idea but the execution lets it down.
The lamp graphics aren't cut out very well, they have jagged edges, if you used a magic wand to cut them out in photoshop make sure you check the antialiasing option to smooth away the jaggies or if you are using cs5 try using the refine edge tool when working with marquees.
I think the your concept has merit and is worth persuing, as you said yourself its an early version. I would ditch the noisy background I've never been in a gallery that has such distracting walls or dirty looking walls. Think about how a picture hangs on the wall, which direction the light is coming from and create a SHALLOW - note the word shallow - drop shadow to lift the images off and perhaps experiment with CSS3 rotation definitions to angle your pictures slightly. Don't worry though in older browsers they will default back to there square alignment.
I've put together a very quick and very crude test of what I mean here:
http://www.chris-spittles.co.uk/codeForForums/gallery/gallery.html
You will need a modern browser i.e. firefox 5 or higher, Chrome, IE9 or Safari to see its true benefit.
It uses HTML5 and CSS3. There is a small JAvascript file to ensure the HTML5 elements render correctly in IE7 and IE8.
Have a look and hopefully you will see what I mean. That example took me 10minutes to create and although it will only really work with 1 image on the page, give me another 30 mins and I'll write a script which can randomise the rotation and position of images on the wall.
Feel free to view the source if you need an explanation of what is doing what, give me a shout.
All the best
Chris.
Chris,
Thanks a lot. i've looked at the page and get the idea. I will do a bit more work on mine and get back to you if that's OK
Peter
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