Web designer Conor MacNeill has built something very special to showcase his travel photography. We find out how it was made.
The site showcases MacNeill's beautiful travel photography
The Fella is the personal website of developer/photographer Conor MacNeill. It focuses on his photography, and each post’s mood fits with that of the image it features.
Hailing from Belfast and currently living in London, Conor works by day as a web designer for the Financial Times Group and by night teaching self-defence art Urban Krav Maga. Since taking up photography in 2010, he's somehow managed to find time to become a multi-award-winning HDR travel photographer.
The blog is easy to navigate and has a relaxed feel
The combination of a talented photographer with website building nouse means his site is something very special indeed. It somehow manages to find the right balance between showcasing the impressive photographs without relegating the importance of the words. It super-easy to navigate and the whole feel of the site is as relaxed as the beautiful travel images it features.
The site uses a number of HTML5 elements such as <time> as well as "techniques like prefetch and prerender to make the site super-fast", MacNeill reveals. Microformats and microdata are also included throughout, and MacNeill remarks that simply "by adding a few extra classes, you can enhance the user’s experience no matter how they choose to read your content".
There's an impressive search facility - crucial for any photography site
MacNeill had hoped to use AppCache, but at the time of writing it only supports using resources on the same domain - so in the end using a CDN was preferable.
But MacNeill hopes to get around this in future by using localStorage. He also feels "even more useful features will appear [down the line] and some capabilities [of browsers] will be refined".
This showcase was originally published in .net magazine issue 235.
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