When I was first brainstorming about the art project photography was what I kept on focusing on. I love taking pictures and am always carrying my camera (especially being the mom of a toddler!). After thinking about how I could meet the criteria for the project and learn something I was interested in as well, I decided on an online photo gallery. Then I was left with the question…where do I begin?!
It was a little daunting at first. I had to hold myself back from asking my husband to show me how to do it. I really wanted to do the research and learn how to do it on my own though. At first, I looked up online photo galleries and I ended up using www.snapfish.com. This is a good site if you want to share photos with friends and family and have the option of ordering prints as well as ordering gifts made with your pictures. However, after I spent a bunch of time uploading pictures to the snapfish site and even more time editing them, I realized I wouldn’t be able to put the gallery I created into my blog. Frustrating…but not too bad since I had fun with it and it’s an account I’ll keep for personal use anyway.
The main inspiration for my gallery was the one my husband put on the blog he created for some friends from our church in Corvallis (whose little girl has cancer) (www.jenessabyers.com). I knew he had to custom create the gallery and get it into the blog somehow himself. It wasn’t a part of the design of the blog already. That sounded like a headache to me. He understands all the code, etc. that you need in order to do all sorts of stuff with websites, blogs, etc. My brain just doesn’t work that way! So, I asked him a little about it just to get an idea…as I was talking to him I was in my wordpress account and noticed that when you are editing a page or post you can choose “slideshows” down at the bottom of the page where you go to upload images. I had never noticed this before. I clicked on “slideshows” and it brought up four different links to sights that you can use to create your gallery and then upload them to your wordpress blog (or embed them). Finally…I was on to something and didn’t need my husband to explain a thing…yet. 
