Simpson Design is alive and well. If you found your way here from one of my websites, such as, The City of Hoopeston or Gateway Entertainment and want to inquire about hiring me, please use the contact form and send me a message.

I am taking some time to decide what will be added to this website. The important thing is keeping a solid focus on what the site is about. Simpson Design is the name of my freelance website design and graphic design business. This site will be focused mostly on displaying my portfolio of design work to attract new clients.

To save time I decided to start out by using a WordPress theme designed by arcsin. It’s a great theme but I will be creating my own WordPress theme for this site.

Beyond that, there will be many articles on design and technology. These articles will be written not for the design professional but for the average person looking for more information of the subject of web design. There is also my zen photo gallery that I want to have integrated.

When all that gets done there might be a personal section opened up for other hobbies i like.

My rank on google for simpson design is pretty much non existent at the moment. I guess thats ok for the time being, there’s not much here to look at anyway. So as this site gets built there will be heavy focus on SEO. Maybe in a year simpson-design.com will find its way to the first page.

Google Notebook could be a waste of time or the best thing ever, depending on what you do on the web. The purpose of it is so you can take down notes while you’re browsing the web.

So do you usually feel the need to jot down notes about sites as you’re browsing around? I actually have, on occasion, drawn a blank when trying to remember which website had a certain something that i needed. Now I just use the notebook whenever something looks interesting that i might want see later.

To view your notebooks quickly there is a downloadable plug in for Firefox which puts a book icon at the bottom of your browser, clicking on it brings up the notebook. You can create new notebooks which is basically like creating a new category, also, it automatically adds the site name and url to the note.

Best parts:

Add pictures to your notebook, automaticly adds url of page, very quick to open and use on the fly, uses Google’s login so you can have your notes on any computer.

Worst parts:

finding a reason to actually use it, deleting notes

Getting zenphoto up and running is not that hard at all. Just create the database, upload the files and run the install. But if you are planning to setup a gallery with thousands of photos and hundreds of albums it will save a lot of time to know a few things ahead of time. Hopefully these handy tips will help with that.

1. Sort through all your photos.

First look through everything and exclude blurred or just plain awful photos. You will no doubt find some, while your at it make sure to rotate any images that need it.

2. Re size everything

If you are on any shared hosting you will have to re size all of your images. those 7MP even 4MP images are way to big for most web hosting servers. It takes large amounts of server memory to re size your large images each time a user views your gallery or during pre-cache. You will end up with no images in your gallery if you don’t re size. A nice size is around 1024×768, I would not go below 600×400. Also note that file size is irrelevant. A photo that is 10MB and 1MP will work, while a 50k 7MP image will not.

If you are hosted with 1and1 your limit is an image size of around 1600×1200.

3. Gallery Structure

You can have as many sub albums as you want. Just don’t create 3 main galleries with 1000’s of photos in each one. This depends upon your server and how much memory you have access to. Having over 5000 images per gallery will generally cause memory problems.

Instead create galleries for a range of topics such as the year the photo was taken or the event. My galleries are grouped by event, such as birthdays, holidays, vacations… It is not a good idea to create non general galleries. If the user visits your main gallery and is greeted by hundreds of small galleries they will get discouraged and only view a small amount before giving up.

Adding all the photos that i have taken over the years to zenphoto is turning out to be a little more difficult than it should be. The admin panel that edits the images just breaks, when I upload certain folders. Can’t seem to narrow down what the problem is with those specific photos.

———-Update April, 19 2008

I downloaded a nightly build of ZP which has the most recent updates. Turns out that the exif data on some of my photos do not have the size embedded. ZP was dividing by zero on those images. The newer version is handling all of those errors without any problem.

———Update April, 20 2008

Problem solved, i was maxing out the memory on my server. Because of how zenphoto is designed, it is not a good idea to place a large amount of photos inside of 1 subfolder.  My album structure will have to change now, probably for the better anyway.

Simpson Design is currently testing exciting new features on this blog.

Trying to get zenPhoto integrated into wordpress. I have the zenpressed plugin working but it has limited functions. So far it looks like total integration is out of reach. The testing is going on daily, check back for more updates.