David Mecey began his career working for Playboy magazine in the fall of 1979, where soon after, becoming a staff photographer, moved to Chicago. In 1987, he would take a title change to Contributing Photographer, where he would continue with Playboy until 2002.
I met David at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch in Pahrump, Nevada for a high performance driving event organized by Driving Concepts. He was one of the instructors in the program and a few months after, I redesigned his online portfolio.
By then I was getting pretty tired of using the same jQuery light box plug-in that everyone else caught onto, so I used something a little different to create an improved photo gallery system. I still used jQuery to achieve the results desired, but there were a few significant usability upgrades.
With the old light box plug-in, users couldn’t provide friends with permalinks to specific photos, making the content more difficult to spread around. You also weren’t able to quickly skip a couple photos ahead of the order in the set, having to close the box and then select another photo.
The solution I used solved all these issues, providing a much friendlier user experience, without having to sacrifice any of the effects the light box plug-in had. Thumbnails fade in and out and the current photo being displayed has its thumbnail highlighted as an indicator.
The website is search engine friendly with a PageRank (PR) of 4 and draws in a consistent amount of traffic. I’ve setup Google Analytics which emails David with traffic reports in PDF format on a daily basis while giving me a complete overview of the traffic and what keywords are performing best.
