All changes were made after user testing. Symmetry plays big role in designing websites and I must say that it looks better after changes were made. I also created ‘split screen’ in home page by dividing left and right side of the site which creates a perfect symmetry –
This is how the site looks at the moment –
Home page
Gallery page
When the site was designed and everything worked perfectly fine, I did user testing. I got positive feedback however, there were a few things that I didn’t notice.
1. Moving text to the left so it’s all in one line – symmetry
2. Making ‘selection’ function as big as rest of the windows
The search is set up to ‘wild card’ which means that you can type only a few letters from any word and if there’s any word in table that consists of typed letters, it’ll pull it out from table and deliver to the site.
PHP and MySQL is working perfectly fine and my job now is to create design of the site. I already did my research, wire frames and mock up so I know exactly how it is going to look like. I need to customize it with CSS.
At the beginning, I wanted to use ‘carbon fibre background’ as it has very professional and elegant look but while I was going through photos that I was going to use, I noticed vintage style picture hanging on the wall and this gave me an idea to create a vintage looking website.
I typed into Google ‘black vintage background’ because I already knew that colour scheme is going to be black/white or grey as it fits perfectly with colours of photos; did a little research about it and found perfect background that downloaded from www.pixeden.com. It is called dark-planingwood.
Fonts
I typed into Google ‘google fonts’ and chosen the right style of font for header. It is called ‘Oleo Script cursive’ which if you have a look closer, is exactly the same as one of the writing on the picture that I took.
Another font that I used for text is called ‘Open Sans Condensed’. The reason for that is that I needed to make it readable and font used for header wasn’t very readable with large text. This font still has a vintage look and it is readable.
Every time you work with tables, you need to make sure you back them up just in case they get deleted for some reason.
Step 1 – connect to database with phpMyAdmin
Step 2 – select the table you want to back up
Step 3 – click ‘Export’
Step 4 – choose different formats you want table export to
Step 5 – save it to folder called ‘SQL’
On ‘index.php’ I decided to have random generated photos from table. The reason for it is that while doing my research I found out that most of the websites used it as some kind of form of introduction to the site, showing users what they can find on the site.
First of all, I needed to create another table in phpMyAdmin. I named it ‘RandomPics‘. It consists of two columns ‘RandPicID’ and ‘pics’. I didn’t need anything else for that.
It was the same code that I used for gallery page with a little change. Instead of 
I’ve chosen new created table for random photos and the code you see above tells it to choose random photos from table. ‘LIMIT 1’ tells it to choose only one photo at the time, you can change it to any number you want and it’ll add more photos. I’ve chosen only one photo at the time.
Then simply echo it out.
I came across to little problem while doing it as I echo out only like this 
which didn’t work. It only pulled out path of the photos. I know now that it was mistake and I sorted it out by pulling it out by ‘img src’.
Photos randomly changes after refreshing page.
I decided to add time/date and day on the site because it is always nice to know what time it is and stay inform about date when you’re browsing internet. It was very simple one line of php code – 
Simple echo, in brackets text we want to appear on the site, ‘.’ is there to link it together as one sentence, ‘date’ and in parentheses ‘l’ standing for day, ‘d.m.Y’ – day,month,year (you can choose any order or any format) and in another ‘date’ there is comma and ‘g:ia’ (g – 24 hours format, i – minutes, a – am/pm small letters).
You can customize this the way you want.
First of all, I had to create a form which looks like this –
Code for that looks like this –
I put it in div because I wanted to customize it in CSS later on.
I created a form and chosen post as I wanted it to post information to different file that I’ve created called ‘search.php’. This is set up by ‘action=”search.php” ‘.
Then I created select option and added two options for users to choose from which was ‘Name’ and Description’.
To create a variable so we can work with it later, I needed to change the name of it so I know which one it is. It is always the one with saying ‘name’.
Then I created field to type in.
Again, I created a variable called ‘search’ by changing ‘name’ and also I set maximal limit of characters to 30. It is because I set up VARCHAR data type in tables to 30. I could decide if I wanted it to be a password type where users would see only ‘*’ instead of full characters or two other types. I went for standard type as it is search box.
Last thing I had to create was submit button. 
I created variables with a function ‘post’ as I wanted it to sent everything that is written and selected in form sending to database.
By the code bellow, I set it up to condition ‘if search bar is empty, echo out You did not enter a search term, please try again.’
Then I created switch which means ‘from whichever selected option, if it is selected ‘Name’ it’ll go to table ‘PhotosTable’ and select information from row ‘Name’ and store it in a variable called $QuerySelect. Creating another variable called ‘$result’ so we can store it there. ‘mysql_query’ is used for selecting data from the table. Last code %search% (wild card) means that even if there’s something similar typed in that row, it’ll still select it. I did the same thing with Description.
Then I created loop and fetched it to another variable ‘$row’ so I could echo it out.
Depending on what users selected and written into search box, it’ll echo out the right pictures and text from tables.
The last code frees data and disconnect everything from database.
This is done by using MySQL query which selects row that we tell it to select (for example for home page I selected row with ID 1).
I created a variable and tell it what number of row I need.
Then I created another variable called $query and tell it to select information from table called ‘ContentTable’ where ID is my variable $ID that I already created. Or if it’s not right, write error.
Once the right row is selected from table, it needs to be stored in the array in another variable so we can echo it out. I’ve done this by using this code – 
I needed to create another variable to store data and select what I want to use from selected row.
The last thing I had to do was to echo it out and made sure it was in appropriate div tag.
I already connected to database so now I had to create a variable where I’d store ALL information from PhotosTable.
Then I created another variable and with ‘LOOP’ I echoed it out.
This is what full code put into div tag looks like:
Then to create lightbox effect, I added java codes and CSS into it:
Veronika Lesnakova 