Wednesday, March 04, 2009

indexhibit

Main _ Gordon McGregor

I've been wanting to re-vamp my website for quite a while now, over at mcgregorphoto.com. A while ago, I cobbled together some html that did a reasonable job of showing the pictures I put up. It was automated slightly, to pick up new pictures as I added them, but somehow I never did. This morning I read about Indexhibit and thought I'd take a look. I've tried various Content Management Systems (CMS) in the past, for web hosting. Including the often recommended Gallery Photo Management System. However, they've always been too feature-rich, and hence complex, or just not quite what I was looking for. I wanted something fairly simple, clean and easy to maintain. That includes being able to add new pictures easily. I wanted to be able to organise the images in terms of projects or folios of work. I use flickr for my stream of consciousness images - all the stuff I shoot ends up on flickr. Family images, holiday snaps, more planned stuff, everything. However, flickr is really not good at all for showing sets of finished work. The long-teased flickrfolio might do that, but I got fed up waiting. I managed to resist my natural urge to start with Indexhibit and then spend the next few weeks researching other options, just in case there is something better out there. Instead, for a change, I decided just to try it out and see how it works.

I was very pleasantly surprised how easy Indexhibit was to install. It took me about 10 minutes to get it up and running on my 1and1 hosted site. That includes setting up a MySQL database backend and configuring the Indexhibit install. I haven't done much with it yet, but you can preview the new look. I'll no doubt be playing around with the format and content over the next few weeks but I am impressed by the ease of use and the look and feel so far. At this point I'm really not interested in doing web design, I want to be able to host the images in a clean and simple way. Indexhibit does that very well.

11 comments:

forkboy said...

I like the very clean and simple look of mcgregoryphoto. It seems to me that many web sites put up by photographers try too hard to wow you with their web site alone.

Yours allows the viewer to be wowed by the pictures.

Anonymous said...

Very clean indeed. I just wish the text and the navigation buttons were a litle bigger and a bit more graphic. Otherwise it was all about the images! (how amazing). I use Visual Server because of its simplicity as well. I want all the bells and whistles outa there.

Thanks for the nice blog; I have been enjoying it lately and have appreciated some of the creativity book recommendations.

Tex said...

Wow, what kind of 1and1 package do you have? I had just about given up thinking it was 1and1.com's fault

Unknown said...

I have a very simple/ cheap 1and1 account - 1and1 home package, about $4.99 a month.

Markus Spring said...

Thanks for the hint to indexhibit. I like the clear and not overloaded style. Now I have to explore how customizable it is - probably well suited for bare html/css munchers like me...

Unknown said...

hello Markus, thanks for the comment. If you get a chance, I'd like to hear how you get on with it.

It seemed pretty clean and configurable from what little I've poked around with it.

Author: BMO said...

I'm actually in the process of trying to install indexhibit with 1and1 and am having some problems.. any chance you could explain step-by-step how to use the database, etc. to start the platform or point me in the right direction?

Tex said...

I got mine to work on 1&1.com, I think just try a couple more times very carefully following their instructions. The instructions are on their site.

Unknown said...

Hi Beth,

I just followed the instructions here but maybe this might help a bit more?

If you have more specific questions/ problems - feel free to ask and I'll see if I can help out.

Unknown said...

I have installed Indexhibit on using 1and1 and anytime i try uploading a picture i get a 500 problem... has anyone else had this problem? if so how did you fix it.

JP said...

smallGod webHosting has a one click automatic installer for Indexhibit.
http://smallgod.net/indexhibit.php