Hi Guys

I wonder if anyone like the idea to have a "lightbox" sideshow for the BLUF Events Pictures as I could help to make one? (for example like this site when you click on one of the picture http://www.meeru.com/gallery.aspx?album=2)
So can just click a mouse button then would go to the next / prev picture rather than have to click each picture each time to see the enlarged picture.

William

Great idea, William...Nice house you have there by the lake, by the way...

Lightbox slide shows are great if you are using a Mac or PC which has a large screen. They are not so good when using smaller devices like PDAs or mobile phones. One of the things I love about the BLUF website is it's simplicity. Personally I'm not convinced that the Lightbox slide shows you are suggesting will enhance my user experience of BLUF.com, especially when I'm away from home and accessing the site on my iPhone. I think you'd be quicker putting together animated GIF slide shows in Fireworks. These can see by everyone regardless of the device and the screen size they are using, and more importantly without the need to scroll and click from one Lightbox image to another.

Ultimately, what we end up with will depend on the new design for the site, which I'm thinking about at the moment - we're pretty close to the limit of what new features can be shoehorned into the present layout, really.

Putting together an animated GIF in fireworks is all very well when you're just doing it for yourself. When you're doing it over 2,700 times however, it'll be rather less fun.

If we do have some sort of slideshow system, it will have to be something that the server can put together on the fly, without the BLUF team spending ages tinkering with everyone's profile.

I will try to make sure that whatever we come up with will work on mobile phones, but I won't promise, because I don't want to unnecessarily restrict what we can do on the desktop, just for the sake of a very small number of people who'll be using the site on the go.

We will be using standard technologies as much as possible, but I might also consider a basic version of the site for mobiles too, much as GearFetish has a simple one that you can use to check and send messages.

The original post of this thread was talking about creating Lightbox slideshows for the BLUF Event galleries, so I'm not sure why you have suddenly switched to talking about slideshows for individual profiles. That was not what was being asked. All I was trying to do was share a thought about a technical restriction with Lightbox slideshows that I have recently become aware of.

You state that you don't want to restrict the new 'desktop' design of the BLUF website for the sake of a small number of people who access it on the go. How do you know there are only a small number of us who access it on the go? I don't remember receiving any kind of questionnaire from BLUF regarding how and where I access the site. So I'm not sure what information you are basing that comment on. As any designer will tell you, the process of redesign starts by finding out how the customer uses the current product and what they want to do with the new one.

The server logs do tell us what browsers people are using, and from that we can determine roughly how many people are accessing the site from mobile devices - we don't need to take up people's time sending out a survey.

There will be some surveys sent out to people, but there are various other pre-requisites first - such as verifying member's email addresses and determining which language they want to receive that sort of information in, which is something that's underway at the moment.

For the last few months (I don't have figures from before we moved to the current server), log analysis shows no mobile browsers in the top 15, the lowest of which accounts for marginally over 1% of the hits to the site (compared to about 25% for IE 8 ). So, I don't consider it very likely that the number of people accessing the site from mobiles will be a large proportion of users at all; given our geographic distribution of members, the majority of people will have desktop access to the net too.

So, I will not be ensuring mobile compatibility at the expense of providing better features for the majority, when we redesign the site. I won't be going out of my way to break the experience for mobile users, but nor am I going to compromise the whole site just for the sake of a few people on the bus playing with their iPhones. It's more likely that the site will be designed so that there can be a specific mobile version produced easily, with limited functionality, as in the case of GF2go.

Even if we look just at event images, there are presently around 5,000 of those, plus thumbnails of each one. Unless we decide to orphan old magazine galleries (which I'm not keen on), then we will have to find a way to bring those into any new design too. That, again, tends to point towards something that can be done on the fly, server-side, or can at least be very easily automated to process the pictures and create galleries in a new format.

Hi

The lightbox slidehsow would detect the browser display size and will auto adjust the image, I could make an example and see if it can work in iphone.
It would be quicker way to do the programming instead of create animated gif, because one program code can fit all pages, but animated gif need to create every time. Also by using web programming, can make it to detect what machine and browser you are using and then auto select / disable the function depends on machine and browser. And of course, it involves a bit more work but just one off coding. Hope I wasn't saying it in too technical way.

William