jostein.kjønigsen.net

Checking out Lightbox 2.0

Recently I've rewritten more or less the entire code-base for one of my other sites. In the end I decided to switch to a much more simplified data-model, and this made the code a lot easier to work with. That, combined with a major increase in traffic lately, have given me much incentive to fool around and improve on the site itself.

So after checking out the HOWTOs and such, I decided I should try Lightbox out.

Lightbox is a Web2.0ish image-handling addon you can add to your site regardless of platform, seeing as it's implemented 100% in JavaScript and needs no server-side code. I honestly don't think everything under the sun should be AJAX and that everything gets better by adding fancy JavaScript snippets. I also happen to believe that if a user feels that one page-refresh is unacceptable, it's pretty much the user that is the problem, not the site itself.

However I am a firm believer in things being functional and that if something can be fancy and improve usability at the same time, it's worth giving it a shot.

So. I decided to add Lightbox to my site. It was a quick and clean process:

  • Unpack Lightbox in my site-directory.
  • Add references to the JavaScript files and a CSS file in the site template.
  • Adjust the path for the images to fit my site.
  • Add a Lighthbox specific REL-attribute to the links I wanted to be Lightbox enabled.
  • That's it. Done.

End results? It looks better and usability has improved. This is not a merely a personal opinion. My logs shows without a doubt that people are actually navigating the site more and checking out more of the stuff I put up.

For being this little work, it was definitely a good investment. For anyone doing websites and want to jazz up the image-handling, I can really recommend Lightbox.

Comments

yoz

www.debians.org


it really *is* nice and decided to give it a try myself. indeed, it was easy to setup and makes the whole thing way nicer!

greets

Suzanne

www.kjenes.com


I tried out that script a couple of months ago (huddletogether.com), but haven't implemented it

on my website yet. It looks great though, and it's sooo easy to implement. (And I'm not a good programmer...)

Skal du oppover til Vaarphaesten forresten?:-)

Jostein

jostein.kjonigsen.net


Suzanne:

Bør vel strengt tatt det. Lenge siden jeg har vært i Trondheim nå!

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