I am not a developer. I don’t create websites for other people. I am only creating a site to help me communicate with customers for my cabinet shop.
I use this site for a lot of purposes.
The primary goal is to get customers to want to hire me.
The secondary goal is to train these customers so that they become better customers.
In the kitchen design business you spend a lot of time just getting people to trust. By the time they figure out you are their best friend the job is almost over with and you have to start it all over again. It’s a lousy business like this.
(To all you developers out there who think rubes like me are a tough customer…you should meet mine.)
The best technique for navigation that I have found so far is to select a kitchen from the grid then scroll vertically. This seems to work well with a desktop display, iPad and iPhone6.
I show four versions of KITCHEN 5.
If you select this from the grid you find your information by scrolling.
I also show these images using a PhotoGallery Stack by Nick Cates and Two versions of a similar PhotoGallery by Foundry.
I don’t know much about Gallery Stacks. Are there any logistical advantages to using galleries over simple scrolling? Does it load faster or are there any other benefits to swiping vs scrolling?
Which method would be quicker to get Kitchen 5- Picture 4 in front of you?
Hi, I don’t have an answer for you I’m afraid, I was just catching up on the latest forum posts after doing some work on a new template, and your post stuck out as it’s about kitchens, and my new template is called Kitchen!
I’ve no idea if a template project is of any use to you, you mention Foundry and my new template is built for Foundry, anyway, not wanting to bang on, I just figured I’d make this post and give you a link to it: https://www.templaterepo.com/demos/kitchen/
It’s not finished yet, but there is enough there for you to see where I’m going with it in terms of design. Once finished I suspect it’ll be about €20.
Give me a shout if you want more info, and good luck with your own new site.
I don’t think there’s a right answer to this. You also know much better than we do it’s like interacting with your clients and the issues they have on a website.
As you mention, for getting to a specific image quickly, your first option works well. You could even improve on that even more, by putting rows of buttons at the top <picture 1> <picture 2>, etc. and have that button takes them to that photo. This is great for getting someone to the photo quickly when you’re on the phone with them. However, It doesn’t make as good of a presentation for people just browsing your kitchens.
With that in mind, the Foundry gallery one gives people a nice overview of the kitchen when you are in the slideshow itself. You’d need to dress up the page the gallery is on more, though. I also like the captions you used here.
The page using Photo would also work pretty good with the captions from the Foundry one.
For me, the advantage of galleries is that you can quickly see a good overview of several images. Scrolling takes more time on a site and if people don’t scroll to the bottom, they may not see the last image and it may be the one that catches their eye. It also allows them to then see large images.
After reading your other post, I wanted to mention that another advantage of a Gallery is that most of them allow you to use smaller thumbnails for the images displayed on the page and only download the larger ones when they click on them to view it. This makes the initial kitchen page load much more quickly.
Have you considered linking each image to a Lightbox? As it is, I click an image and am taken to another page, and will have to return. With a light boxed image selection,(I use Limelight) I just click a photo, look at the images, close it, and select another photo without leaving the page. Its a more immediate user experience. My way of finding what I want is to go through everything and then narrow it down. Thats a lot of clicking photos, returning, clicking another, returning etc…
just a thought.
Making the photo a link also makes selection easier than using the underlying text. I often run the cursor over images as I move, then its a click away.
I’ve just added a gallery page to the template, this is using the regular Foundry Gallery stack. If you haven’t already tried it, this will show you how it works.
I agree that Limelight is a great option for this kind of thing. Not only can you present your images in a very flexible lightbox, you could even show your additional pages in a lightbox. Click on the items in the ‘Some of what I do…’ section on this page to see an example of this approach.