Community @ The Turning Gate

Good morning, Matthew and Rod,

I should warn you that I know just about nothing about setting up a website, coding, stylesheets, or any of that stuff. So you should pat yourselves on the back for coming up with all your wonderful TTG stuff that I've actually been able to do something with, and get something online. Thanks!

I should also let you know that a lot of what I've done on the site -- positioning, formatting, etc. -- has been by guess, or by playing with snippets of code found online. How I've used this code, and how/where I've positioned it based on your structure is probably all very bad website behavior.

Before I go further, the site is http://www.caribbeanphotosource.com
To access the locked gallery under "For Clients", use cps guest as both username and password. (Inside that locked gallery are multiple "open/unlocked" galleries. The galleries under the "Albums" menu are all "open/unlocked.") (With the exception of the opening slideshow, the galleries to date are still incomplete and just a beginning to get things working.)

I'm at the point in setting up my site where I need some problem solving help, and also some advice (any and all you can provide would be great!). Things seem to be working as hoped on the laptop version, but they're not behaving as well on the iPad version. (If you're able to compare the two, my problems may be more clear.)

I'd like to make some progress with the site, improve it, and add more galleries/albums, but I'd like to solve the current problems before I create even more work (or more problems)...

Problem 1. The opening slideshow
1. On the opening screen, when the iPad is in portrait format, the white border -- which should frame the slide show images -- shows only on the top edge of horizontal images, and only on the top and two sides of vertical ones. When the iPad is turned to landscape format, the white border appears on the top and bottom of horizontal images but not the bottom. And still on only the 3 edges of the vertical images.

2. The horizontal images in the slide show, in the iPad version, are also not showing full frame; they appear cropped slightly on both sides.

3. On the laptop version of the home screen, the little white arrows that appear on the left and right edges of the photos are not symmetrical -- the one on the left overlaps the border. (But this is a very minor thing.)

Problem 2. The logo and adjacent text at the bottom of the page
1. At the bottom of each page of the site, I managed to position a centered logo and, to the right of it, a few lines of text with hard returns. The text appears correctly on the laptop version and on the landscaped iPad, but on the portrait-mode iPad, the lines wrap rather than resize to fit the space. (If I include the text as part of the logo graphic, I don't know how to keep the logo centered and the text offset. So ideally the text would resize so suit the screen.)

Problem 3. Thumbnail frames missing
On the laptop version, if you drill down through galleries under "Albums," for example, and open the gallery called "Best of Antigua Classic, 2013," you'll see that the thumbnails are sitting in light gray frames, with black identification text (name and number) inside the bottom of each frame. This is how it should appear, and it does on the laptop version, for all the galleries under both "Albums" and "For Clients."

1. On the iPad version, these gray frames are not visible. Instead, the thumbnails sit on the dark blue background, as does the identification text of each image (not nearly as attractive, and difficult to read).

Problem 4. Page loading problem
The site is organized with "open (unlocked)" nested galleries under the Albums header, and with "open" nested galleries inside "locked" galleries (just one so far) under the "For Clients" header.

1. On the iPad, when at the second level down within the Albums page (click on "Sailing and Yaching" to see the text and the icon for "Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta"), if I then open the drop down menu and click on "For Clients," the new page will not open -- instead the little "loading" indicator moves about an inch then starts jerking.

2. On the laptop, if I do the same thing as described above (open the drop down menu and click on "For Clients", the link attempts to go to the Home page then puts up an "Image not found" error message for the first image in the slide show. From elsewhere on the site, the link appears to always work properly.

3. If, in each of these scenarios, I click the "Back" button on my browser, then access "For Clients" from the drop down menu again, the link works.

4. All of the other pages ( Info, Who We Are, etc.) load properly when accessed as described above.

Other questions:
1. Typography. I'd like to change the type set -- still Futura if possible but not cast in stone -- to one that includes a condensed version. Partly to make the typography a little more stylish, but also so that a longish gallery name will fit better across the width of the thumbnail, for example. Can this be done from within what is already built (even universally?), or do I have to start from scratch? Either way, any advice would be appreciated.

2. Publisher. I haven't yet used Publisher, and I'm still somewhat confused reading the documentation. But I'd like to start using it. Can my existing galleries (particularly the many that are currently in the "For Clients" section) be converted to use with Publisher, or do I have to rebuild all the existing galleries within Publisher. (Any and all direction appreciated.)

3. Index or search function. Is there any way an index or search function can be built into the site (a Google search, for example) to find images based on name, caption, or keywords? It would make image searching by clients much easier!

Other notes:
1. I like the way the "Info" page appears on the laptop version, and on the landscape-view iPad. I don't mind the single-column treatment that shows in the portrait-view iPad. But is there a reason this happens?

2. Same comment about the "Who We Are" page.

Thanks in advance for everything,
Best,
Steve

Confused. again.
First-time doing this, working on a new site.
If I'm going to be using Auto Index for my Galleries
and
I'm going to replace "Sevices" in the menu with Client Galleries, accessing a folder called "clients" and utilizing an Auto Index template for this....
When I export my initial site from Pages do I toggle OFF "Export Galleries page" and "Export Services page" in the 'Export Pages' section? ("You can disable any pages not being used...")

Thanks in advance.