Arnaud Matar
Freelance website created for Arnaud Matar, a professional photographer based in Montpellier, south of France.
Summary of the brief
Freelance website created for Arnaud Matar, a photographer based in Montpellier, south of France. The client travels for several months a year and wanted to leverage his travel photography into getting more commissions and eventually move into stock photography. He also wants to organise more general photoshoots at home, so I created a content-managed portfolio website which imports data from the client’s Flickr account using JavaScript, AJAX and the Flickr API.
I did everything on the site including all design work, all HTML / CSS using Bootstrap, all custom JavaScript, plus some jQuery plugins where necessary. Most of the technical complexity revolved around the importing of JSON data from the Flickr API, and the subsequent processing / manipulation of this data within the site’s Gallery, all created from scratch using regular JavaScript.
- Vanilla JavaScript
- AJAX
- Flickr API
- Bootstrap 4
- HTML5 & CSS3
- jQuery Plugins
- Logo Design
- All Graphic Design
Skills used
Flickr API / Javascript / AJAX
At the beginning of the project I spent a lot of time looking at the Flickr API documentation, seeing what kind of Javascript methods were available, and what sort of information would add value to a professional photographer’s website. I also wanted to maximise website performance and not make too many JSON requests.
Photos are organised into galleries within the Flickr account and then tagged appropriately. Each time a new gallery link is clicked on the website, a JSON request is performed and the photos from that gallery are imported and displayed. The photos can then be ordered by location, popularity, or date taken, and further sub-filtered so that the user only sees photos from a particular city. Please note that the site is currently populated with royalty-free stock photography until the client has collated and uploaded his own work.
Bootstrap 4
Normally I write websites using Modular HTML and SASS, but Bootstrap is a useful framework if you need to get something done really quickly. It provides extensive documentation for common HTML elements, dozens of custom HTML and CSS components, and jQuery plugins. The key here is rapid development, so the default styles are all extremely elegant, and the hundreds of built-in classes mean that you can literally write an entire website in HTML without having to write a single line of CSS (but of course, you normally would write at least some CSS).
Results
The Arnaud Matar site is a content-managed ecosystem using AJAX which eliminates any need for backend programming; a contemporary and elegant single-page website which provides an excellent base for the client to build on in the future.