Wessex Archaeology is one of the largest commercial archaeological practices in the UK, employing over 160 people. We are a registered charity with educational objectives and play a vital role in helping people learn about their past.
In September 2005, we decided the Wessex Archaeology gallery (on the web) was looking a little long in the tooth. It was using a proprietary ASP gallery script and the process of uploading new photos was a pain. We had to manually create thumbnails, medium and large size versions of each photo, and follow a rigid structure. There was no chance for people to interact with the photos themselves, and the script itself was not particularly reliable.
This realisation triggered a review of our website strategy, stimulating an investigation into new 'web 2.0' approaches, such as social media, blogging, RSS and podcasting.
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One of the major factors that makes Flickr a good service to use, is that they provide an API. They encourage people to build applications that use the photos that they host. This enabled us to build our photos back into our website with our own look and feel, and thus have our gallery accessible from two locations.
Using the FAlbum plugin for WordPress, the engine which powers our blogs, integration of our Flickr account into our own site was very simple. A simple install and quick edit to the templates, and it looked like the rest if our website. A quick edit to the main site navigation, and it was live, and updating itself from Flickr whenever we added a new photo or even changed a description. Since Flickr handles image resizing for you, there's even less work to do.
This is cool! As it happens, I've also implemented a Flickr/Wordpress plugin to pull my own (or anyone's) images into my blog. The gallery page is also part of the same plugin. So I was able to pull in the image above directly from Flickr, using the WordPress edit interface that's been updated with the Flickr FAlbum plugin.
