I have a feeling a lot of the MPW people are going to be critiquing the websites of the MPW faculty, but I’m going to go ahead with Penny De Los Santos’ site anyway.
I’ve seen the Livebooks format before, but I think this particular portfolio does an exceptionally good job of presenting the images and tweaking the basic template to make it more personalized. The white background, I feel, has a lot to do with this; it sets off the bright colors of Penny’s photos (and the contrast of the black and white images) in a way that black backgrounds can’t. I tend to lean toward black backgrounds when presenting my own images, so this made me rethink my ways.
I liked that there was a variety of images to choose from in each of the galleries, and particularly that there were multiple ways of selecting a large photo to view–there is both a ‘back/next’ arrow bar and a scrolling stream of thumbnails. I am not sure that I would use this particular type of scroll, as it jumps too much for my liking (I’d rather it jump to the next image one at a time instead of skipping ahead several images), but I would like to find a way to give more viewing options.
Overall, the site is well-presented; however, I wish there had been more incorporation of caption material. Only two galleries of five had this information; when it did appear, it mentioned only the publication for whom Penny was working when she made the photo. I would have liked to see more details about the subjects themselves, or where the photo was taken (this detail did appear in the ‘travel/food’ portfolio, but I feel it applies to all of the categories except the lone ‘food’ one). Also with regard to caption material, the rollover text frustrated me because I kept forgetting not to move the cursor while I was reading, and the words would disappear before I could finish. Since it is optional to show the captions in the first place, it seems like they should remain onscreen; the viewer has already seen the corresponding image in full, and the words will not distract from a proper presentation.
