Sometimes it is our absolute pleasure to be stretched into making a massive site. A project that blew all previous projects out of the water. Usually that is by way of design, look or feel. But, when photographer Matthew Thomas came to us and asked us to produce an online web gallery based in Flash – we knew this was going to take our web skills to a whole new level.

The Views of Sussex Website

Stephen, our main designer and manager of HeartCo took the lead on this project. Having several years worth of University studies into Digital Media, such as Flash, he was able to produce a gallery that not only viewed the images but came complete with a menu system and can even be edited by the end user. The end user needed the capacity to add or edit photos in the end result, but didn’t have access to Dreamweaver, Flash or any other of the software that would be required. So, using XML coding within Flash – we were able to make the gallery completely editable using only a few text files saved as .xml on the server.

The Gallery, Views of Sussex Website

The final gallery viewer also included a simple zoom function and links that were connected to PayPal and enabled to viewer to shop, edit shopping and, of course, purchase the prints that they liked from the site.

The rest of the site was built using simple HTML and PHP coding. The especially exciting parts were the inclusion of a Cutenews plug-in and, as previously mentioned, the PayPal connectivity.

We were excited to learn that the Photographer who commissioned this site, Matthew Thomas, won BBC Judges Choice for Wildlife Photography in 2010. Congratulations on the award and the website!

You can see the Views of Sussex website here.