Publish a Web Album Using Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Dreamweaver- Part 3

So now we have you pile of images looken real good, nicely organized in directories with an index.htm file, nice. Are we ready to publish this on the net? Well, yes…but. There always is a but. Here are a couple of suggestions that will help you enhance your online photo album.

1) Make sure your album (folders and all) are in the correct location with the website contents that you publish from, usually it is best to create a new folder in the root of the domain that will display the photo album online.

2) Fire up your favorite web editing program. In my case it is Dreamweaver so I will use this program as an example. If you are using GoLive, Front Page or any other web editing program you have to equate it to Dreamweaver’s examples.

3) Open the index file. Have a look. If there are any cosmetic changes you want to make do it now. Here is an example of an Adobe Photo album; http://www.weprintcolors.com/screens/screen_ps_photo_album_sample.htm . Here is an example of a Dreamweaver Photo album http://www.weprintcolors.com/screens/screen_dw_photo_album_sample.htm .

4) Open one html page from the ‘pages’ directory. Have a look. This time what you are looking for is ‘Global’ changes that you would like to make. By global changes I mean changes that can be implemented using the ‘find and replace’ feature. Remember that each one of the auto generated webpages is still basic html. The great part about this is the code is consistent, so find and replace is easy. The first find and place is for ‘text’ only. What we are looking for is improper grammaticism such as .gif or .jpeg appearing in the body. Often Photoshop and Dreamweaver will create this automatically unless you turn it off. If not, no biggy we’ll do a find and replace. ‘Find’ the word .gif and replace it with nothing (no value).

5) This one is for the advanced webmaster. Look carefully at an html page within your ‘pages’ directory after you have done your facelift. Create a couple of include files. Plan on placement, sizing, content etc within this page. The reason you may wish to do this is for common footers, banner advertising or any other use you may have to update all files from one. Once you have your webpage figured out, use the find and replace feature again to place your include files.

6) In the photo album created in Dreamweaver You will notice a line of code that reads as follows (in tags) meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1". You can find and replace this with your Meta tag keywords and description. In Photo shop it looks like this (in tags) META name="generator" content="Adobe Photoshop(R) 7.0 Web Photo Gallery"

Once you have completed your photo album employing the above noted tips you are ready for the search engines to crawl your website and understand your subject matter. Here are a couple of examples of photo albums I have built:

• http://www.cardtemplates.com/business_sets/index.htm
• http://www.cardprinting.net/
• http://www.printinglogos.com/logos_start.htm
• http://www.stockphotowarehouse.com/
• http://www.weprintcolor.com/buscard_samples/
• http://www.weprintcolor.com/buscard_examples/index.htm

Happy photo album building ;-)

About The Author Robert is an online leader in graphic design and print. Online since 1999, Robert has spearheaded the success of http://www.weprintcolor.com by providing the finest online graphic design system on the web.