The plan was simple: put a few photos on the homepage. It became the most-reworked thing on the site by a wide margin, and almost none of the rework was bugs. It was me looking at a version that worked and deciding it didn’t.
First it was a single tall column of big images — clean, but you had to scroll past the whole roll to reach anything else. So I made a grid. The grid wanted a way to see a photo full size, so I added a lightbox: click a frame, it opens over a dimmed page, arrow keys and swipe to move between shots, no reload. Then the homepage wanted its own smaller version of that, so the lead photo got a thumbnail strip under it — click a thumb, the big one swaps in place.
Then the real questions showed up, the ones “put some photos up” hides:
- Crop the thumbnails into tidy squares, or letterbox them and show the whole frame? Letterbox. Don’t crop someone’s photo to make a grid look neater.
- If you letterbox, what color are the bars? I used a soft grey and it read as a box around every photo. It should be the page background, so the photo just floats.
- Five photos in the strip, or all of them? All of them, scrolling sideways.
- Does the big frame jump around when you swap a portrait for a landscape? Yes — until I pinned it to one aspect ratio and let each photo fit inside.
The last fix was a two-pixel outline on the selected thumbnail that looked off-center. The scroll strip clips vertically, so an outline drawn outside the box got its top edge cut. Moved it inside the box; done.
None of these were hard. There were just a lot of them, hiding behind four words.