My sister, Molly Bitters, has her own jewelry business, Macabi Studios, which I've been creating the webpage for for I guess a little over two years, now.
It started with a really ugly burlap image background, which was also a page-load hog, and chunky vertical organization of pretty much everything in the center of the page. Her logo was much clunkier, too, at first: the name of her business with the "M" dangling down in front of the "S" of "Studios" and the final "s" of "Studios" being huge and encroaching on the space of "Macabi". Symmetrical, yes, but not quite so elegant as what she's settled upon.
Thankfully, a websearch introduced me to frames and a glorious new approach was begun. My sister and I haggled over what I could do and what she wanted, managing to get our sidebar design (which is still problematic because we use an image map and it's not very responsive to different sized screen settings - some people won't be able to see the Contact link and maybe not even the Gallery one. But it's still damned pretty!), as well as the main page one.
Thereafter, we began to suss out the labels for the sections of the site (there's been at least one major change, from "Shows" to "Events", in an attempt to encapsulate her inclusion in galleries as well as having booths at art fairs and such). Initially, I included in her Gallery everything she's done, including her shows and work from when she was an undergrad Ceramacist with minors in Metalworking and Printmaking at the University of Illinois. You can still see most of her ceramic teeth images that we had from her show "Orange Goo" from a link in the Artist section, but the pictures of the jellyfish lamps have been removed until they are available for sale. The Gallery also underwent a transformation - initially everything there was piled vertically, too. Now it is loosely tiled, though I'm considering shrinking the image sizes by half again to make room...
The current categories from the main Gallery page are:
*Intaglio Series
*Intaglio Earrings
*Rings (only 1 image, untiled)
*Belt Buckles (only 2 images, untiled)
*Burn Necklaces (only 6 images, untiled)
*Burn Earrings (needs to be split into 2 pages)
*Cuffs (only 3 images, untiled)
*Brooches
Within the Intaglio Series, there are links to:
*Leatherenes
*Intagliettes (needs to be split into 2 pages)
*Earrings
*Cufflinks (only 2)
*Tie Tacks (only 2)
*Bracelets (only 1)
Some of the other categories interlink, as well, various kinds of connected earrings pointing to each other, and so forth.
Periodically, my sister will take pictures of her newest creations (at my urging), using her light box and some heavy paper to make what I think are pretty good shots. However, she's often found these photos lacking and recently paid a guy a whopping amount of money to take "professional" slides. Admittedly, the resultant slides are pretty crisp, making some of her photos look a little green by comparison, but overall, the detail you can see on the work itself isn't noticeably any better, in my opinion. But it's her business - all I've got to do is crop and shrink the images to the right sizes for the thumbnail and larger sizes that we use on the site.
A couple of the best pieces of HTML that I've found in my scavenging for scraps from which to make her site are the "_top" and "_blank" target designation values, which force the page to either force a full reload in the already open window or open a fresh window. With the frames, the full reload is really, really important. My first few attempts at frames were quite frustrating as the fractioning of the available window with a new framed window within the window with a new framed window within the window within that... You get the picture. I still consider the anchor tag to be my "favorite" HTML code piece but I have great respect for "_top" and "_blank".
