Making galleries without design skills

[mrenaud]

I've never made my own galleries before but I want to start. From what I've seen to get listed it looks to me like you must have pretty good design skills. I can build clean well designed web sites but galleries I'm having trouble getting going. I don't have experience with photoshop to create my own ads and such.

If anyone can help me out here that would be great.

Also, what do most people use to build their galleries....I'm likely going to use good old notepad because that's how I code.

Thanks

[Useless]

I use a combination of CuteHTML, Adobe PS, and Arles.

You don't need great graphic skills for galleries. Just create decent sized and clear thumbs. Grab some graphics from your sponsors if you feel the need. Use a few choice lines of good sales text.

I personally like the cleaner, more amateur looking galleries, but many people go nuts with heavy graphics and flashy shit. From what I've seen, those who create the graphically intense galleries are only impressing themselves.

[Mr. Blue]

I do a mix of easy clean text ones, middle of the road graphical ones, and heavy intensive graphic ones. I like to have that variety. I've learned a lot in the few months doing adult pages. My first galleries and pages completely suck compared to what I do now. I'm actually embarrassed by what I used to think was a good page...hopefully I'll just keep getting better

Programs I use:
Dreamweaver MX (the best html program out there). I used to be a notepad writing webpage designer, but this is quicker and it writes fairly clean code. A lot better than most wysiwyg editors + you can still write code with one flip of the view. Some say there's a learning curve with this, but if you handcode in notepad you'll have no problem with it. Only people that don't know html have that learning curve thing with this program.

Photoshop CS (You can make complete pages there and in time they're quicker to make then html ones). Also use this to create your thumbs. It takes a little more time than the batch processing programs, but the results are really worth it. You can also automate a lot of the commands to speed up the process.

Image Ready - It does some things that photoshop can't. Pretty easy to make basic animated gifs in it as well.

Arles Image Web Creator - I use this as well...this is good if you want to knock out quick pages with decent looking thumbs (Photoshop thumbs are way better though). Also good to handle resizing quickly, making up quick tables with photos, etc.

Other graphics programs I use, Ulead 3d, for some quickie 3d graphics.

There's some good tutorials out there that will help you with your gallery making. I'll list a few here:

http://www.freenudegalleries.com/guide/

This guide is one of the best you can find. It really helped me change the way I write galleries. It was posted on another forum (Medium Pimpin)...really an excellent read.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/des...site-photoshop

If you want the basics of how to design a whole webpage in photoshop that link above is a good place to start. You'll get the basics you need to know about cropping, slicing, etc.

http://share.studio.adobe.com/axBrowseProduct.asp?p=2

This site is from adobe. It has tons of premade actions, filters, brushes, etc. All free to download and easy to install. They have some really nice premade text actions.

http://www.1001freefonts.com/

Umm, not really a tutorial or anything, but everyone should have tons of fonts. Considering they're free you might as well pick up as many as you can. They come in handy when you're making graphics cause certain fonts just suit certain niches.

You don't need to make graphically intense pages, but as I said it's great to have that variety at hand. Also you should take the time to learn how to automate processes in photoshop as it will save you a ton of time.

Hope this helps

[grzepa]

Ditto what UW said, if you'll make your gallery looks clean , make great looking sharp and have fresh content nobody's gonna reject you for the lack of fireworks here and there...

[mniki]

You can try combination of : Photoshop for thumbs and resize images, Macromedia Fireworks for cute graphical design and gif animations, Dreamweaver to mix results of your work from photoshop and fireworks into great gallery page

[mrenaud]

Great info everyone thanks for your input.

[Ramster]

I use photoshop for the thumbs cropping each one by one. Gives the gallery a better look I think.

[Mr. Blue]

Originally Posted by Ramster

I use photoshop for the thumbs cropping each one by one. Gives the gallery a better look I think.

You don't realize how much better until you start doing it. After doing your first gallery with photoshop thumbs you'll never go back to using the batch programs to make the thumbs for galleries.

[cyberdream]

Spend more time on the content than the graphical issues. I don't think anyone has ever joined your sponsors website becuase they thought your graphics were all in order. Fresh new content will always give you a good start.

[GeorgeTH]

I actually try my best to have CSS formatted text instead of all graphics on my galleries...
I think it works better with SEs, makes the page load faster, and can look just as neat.

Some graphics I simply copy from sponsor tours, some I make myself (in PaintShop) taking the sponsor tour as a guidance. But then it usually takes me some 2-3 hours to get a new template done (hence I don't have as many as I should have).

Only recently have I started to make my own thumbnails by hand (PaintShop again - I hate that Photoshop wants me to buy a new computer, where it works fine all day long without running PS) - and yes: great improvement, but again time consuming (~30 minutes incl. submission thumbs).

[Mr. Blue]

I notice some TGP's don't allow certain CSS, have you run into this? One of my favorites and most productive has a general simple html policy and I can't use any css there...so I've stopped using it.

[Joe]

Originally Posted by Mr. Blue

I notice some TGP's don't allow certain CSS, have you run into this? One of my favorites and most productive has a general simple html policy and I can't use any css there...so I've stopped using it.

I've been using simple CSS for fonts and backgrounds and never have been rejected.

Perhaps CSS with image overlays may be a problem.

[Mr. Blue]

I've only run into it on two tgps, but they happen to be two of the best ones for me...so I knuckled under and returned to old school html.

[GeorgeTH]

Originally Posted by Mr. Blue

I notice some TGP's don't allow certain CSS, have you run into this? One of my favorites and most productive has a general simple html policy and I can't use any css there...so I've stopped using it.

1. I never use an external CSS
2. I never use mouseovers (or similar things) in my CSS
3. you can try to include CSS-like formatting inside a font tag
sample:

<font style="{color: white; font-size:12px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-decoration: none; line-height: 75% }">text goes here</font>

4. I never had any problems with mine

[-efreet-]

to buy design for 10-20$ is better

[cyberdream]

Originally Posted by grzepa

Ditto what UW said, if you'll make your gallery looks clean , make great looking sharp and have fresh content nobody's gonna reject you for the lack of fireworks here and there...

I second the motion