30.11.2006
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.