Monique is a talented artist that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. She does photography (mostly wedding photography) as well as design (mostly print) and illustration. Her skills are considerable and I highly recommend browsing round the website and having a look at some of her work. You won’t regret it.

As with The Brothers Streep‘s website I decided not to use a CMS for this project as I wanted to build up my skills in developing a functional image gallery (both the back-end management side of things as well as the front-end interface). To do this I employed two separate frameworks to work in. For the server-side code I used Tyler Hall’s Simple PHP Framework (a brilliant example of a no-framework framework). The front-end code was based on the excellent Easy Front-end Framework from Alan Grakalic. I can recommend both of these frameworks for quick deployment and a solid base for any project to start from. Each image gallery is structured using the file system istelf. This results in a system that is not all that flexible, but it is quick and in this case speed is more important than flexibility.

Given the nature of the content of the site, the interface needed to be very visual and allow the user to see as much of Monique’s work as possible. I think this was achieved well and was due in no small part to the site design, which was created by Monique herself. It just made sense for her to do it really – what with her being a designer and all.

Since the initial development, I have subsequently added a blog to the site that is available here. It was initially set up for Monique to journal her travels through Europe, but in the future it will evolve into something different that she is still to decide upon. I used WordPress for the blog functionality and implemented the look-and-feel using a free theme from WooThemes that I styled to match the look of the main website. I made a few small customisations to the theme as well, but they are not worth making a big deal over.

I continue to do support for Monique and add requested enhancements as the need arises, but she manages all the content herself.

Details:

• URL: http://www.moniquemouissie.co.za
• Platform/Framework: Easy Front-end Framework, Simple PHP Framework, WordPress (blog)
• Javascript library: jQuery
• Main features: Custom image galleries | All content managed entirely by client | All server-side code entirely object-oriented | Blog managed using WordPress