The Wicked Good Gallery grew from an idea mentioned at http://w3schools.com/forum and discussions with the people at http://lilyclaireart.com.

The challenge was to build a gallery application that would allow site visitors to view and purchase artwork and be very easy to administer.

The gallery offers two viewing modes, navigation through the thumbnails at the top of the page, and a slide show. The thumbnails are limited by the width of the page, so not all thumbnails may be displayed. Arrows are used to indicate additional images earlier or later in the list. Clicking on a thumbnail displays a larger image, along with the associated HTML. The slide show hides the HTML and centers the image, then loops through the images to display all the images of the gallery. It’s as if the site visitor is walking through the gallery, looking at artwork.

Administration is through SFTP/FTP/SCP. The person running the site creates a directory, named for the image, and places the original image .jpg in it, as well as free form HTML. When the site loads the next time, it will find the new directory, check for a thumbnail and detail image, and create them if necessary. When site visitors click on the thumbnail, the HTML will be displayed with the image.

With respect to SEO, each image is represented with a dedicated URL. The artwork’s name is used as the title, and the more text in the HTML for that image, the better.

All requests into the application are routed through a single file. If the requests map to an image, the appropriate artwork is displayed, otherwise, the home page, or contact page is shown.