My dad’s rad website
Hey, everybody. Check out my dad’s cool new website for his photography business, Gary Clarke Photos. Denny helped him get it set up, including the ecommerce portion and a really cool gallery generator that Denny invented.
My dad has worked for decades doing photography for Iowa State athletics; if you’ve ever seen the big sports schedule posters around Ames, that’s probably his work. For a variety of reasons, he’s interested in branching out into youth sports, and the website will be a good delivery medium.
He’s really the best sports photographer around. We were looking at other sports photography sites to get ideas for how other people do them, and I couldn’t believe how downright crappy so many of the images are (and I won’t even get started on the terrible web design). I hope people recognize what great work he does.
Oh, I forgot to mention a funny thing that happened. I was sleeping last night and I dreamed that Denny and some other people had done something very strange and scientific to me. I don’t remember what it was, but I think it had to do with swapping out my regular Aprille molecules with weird molecules. Though it was temporarily unpleasant, it was going to have a positive end. I was mad at him not necessarily because he did it, but because he did it without asking me. I half-woke up and said to him, “Was it against my will?” He made some gurgly sleep noise. I said, all grumpy-like, “We’ll talk about this in the morning.” And then I wouldn’t let him snuggle me.
Your dad is rad in general; his pictures are so good. Sometimes I brag about his pictures to my work people, and I also have the picture he took of us in Hilton on my desk. I took a look at some of those soccer pictures. I don’t think the site is showing up correctly for me, though (I’m using IE6 – there’s my first mistake). It showed the picture of your dad and the “catching the football” picture underneath, but then there was just white space to the left. I had to scroll way down to see the galleries.
Maybe the welcome message from 03/03 should have the date stripped from it and be moved to the top of the page as a general welcome heading? It’s a nice crisp intro to the site and is buried right now.
Cool galleries. Great photos. Site loads fine for me in Firefox for Windows.
Emily, thanks for the tip. It does look a little weird in IE6 although I only briefly saw the large expanse of whitespace.
Map — You’re right. That was an obvious flaw in the first design, but I fixed it last night. Check out the site now. There will be various other small improvements rolling out over the next couple of weeks.
Ah, yes. That looks much cleaner. Are the dates associated with the galleries the dates the gallery was created or the date of the athletic event? Maybe that doesn’t matter.
Denny, I played around with my window size and that’s what affected the white space thing. What’s weird, though, is when my window was maximized, it’s normal… when i make it a little smaller, white space problem again… smaller still, problem goes away again…
Dates are the date the actual event occurred.
Is Gary’s website open for business, or is this just a testing phase? I know quite a few of the kids in the pictures, and would be happy to spread the word, but don’t want to if they really can’t order the pics yet.
Why don’t you ask him? His email address as it pertains to that site is gary (at) garyclarkephotos.com (no spaces and an ampersand, of course). I believe it’s open for business, but I’ll let him have the final work on it.