I’ve recently started working for a small local company as a web developer, ironically my focus in school was on design and never did a whole lot of actual development. Thankfully I was able to make that clear through the application process and they were looking for someone who was familiar enough with the foundational concepts and had enough interest in the subject to self-tech and adapt to the role over time, which I’m pretty confident in my ability to do… that being said, I’m still pretty green when it comes to developing/implementing custom features for sites. So I thought I’d start a discussion here, since I know places like Stack Overflow prefer I ask a specific, answerable question and I’m not really there quite yet.
So they put me on a pretty straightforward project where a client wants us to develop a basic online photo album/book. We host our sites on WPEngine and build a lot of them (at least the structure) using Divi. The client designed the book layout herself, and just wants us to make a website the rest of her family can access, so it should also be an extremely low-traffic site. I’ve already got that set up, all the pages are in place and you can navigate to each next and previous page from the one you’re on (also planning on adding a menu to go to specific pages).
The main thing I’m starting to work on and trying to figure out how to do is add interactivity to the images in the photo album. The way my boss would like me to do it, is to create clickable areas on top of the images that open the full-size version in a slideshow-type format that lets you cycle through all of the images on that page. He’d also like to have a button to download the selected image, since the client is not very tech savvy and he wants to make it as straightforward as possible for them.
So I’m just doing some research trying to figure out how to go about this at the moment. My current thought process is to use Javascript (which I’m somewhat familiar with) and JQuery (which I’m trying to learn by the seat of my pants) to create responsive, clickable areas that, when clicked, call a function to open a lightbox gallery (or something like that) of the full-size images on that page. I could probably figure this out myself but the issue is that she sent us the book as sequential PNGs, so we’re using those as the page backgrounds, and that’s why I need to add clickable areas instead of just implementing a regular lightbox…
But yeah, does that sound like the right general thought process to anyone else? As I said I’m still pretty new to this side of the field so I’m kinda learning as I go. Hope I didn’t do too terrible a job of explaining things and I’m happy to discuss/elaborate anything further. Thanks to anyone who takes the time to read and respond to this, I seriously appreciate it.