The way we are redesigning the images is that all image thumbnails will be showing up on the mineral detail page, together with a description when you hover over a thumbnail. We made the image use cool modal pop-ups so you can still see which page you came from.
John Betts was gracious enough to let us use his photos, which are incredible, and this will really enhance the site. The photos from my collection are pretty bad, but now that I know photography quite a bit better, the new photos I'll add will be much better. Though I won't have the time for quite a while to add new photos yet.
Every photo we post has very detailed information about the mineral. We want to try to give a varied approach on the photos of each mineral and will try not to show all different styles and color possiblilites of each mineral.
I'll be keeping you posted with our progress on editing the mineral pages. So far, we have edited ALL the minerals up until the sulfates. This includes the minerals in the following groups:
- Native Elements
- Sulfides
- Oxides
- Halides
- Carbonates
- Borates
Now granted some important minerals are missing in the above lists, but we'll eventually get to these. We only worked on the list from the old site, which was missing alot minerals.
We just finished editing all the Borates, and are working on the Sulfates. This is a really grueling and time consuming process, as every bit of information is being researched and double checked. Especially time-consuming are the locality information, as the old site had all this really outdated. Each mineral takes on average an hour to edit, and there are hundreds in the system! Working on Anglesite now.
The Redesign of the minerals.net website involves many extensive projects.
The following items have either been done or are actively being worked on:
- New Design
- Transformation of ALL data from static HTML into dynamic, database-controlled ASP.net pages
- New Minerals section
- Update content of all mineral pages with more accurate information
- Totally recreate the mineral localities to the most practical and relevant locations
- Redo all the images, as well as import new images from new sources
- Creating new and powerful filtering methods for finding minerals
- Redeveloping of the Glossary and adding many new terms
- Redeveloping the entire gemstone section
- Updating all the content on the gemstone section to make it more relevant
- Purchase mineral accessories and books on our own Amazon Store
After the above list is complete, we will be working on the following:
- Mineral Resources Redesign
- Adding new minerals
- Adding new gemstones
- Adding new mineral and gemstone pictures
- Comprehensive Mineral Directory
- Dynamic Image Gallery
Stay tuned for updates!
Over the past several months we have been working extensively on redeveloping the entire Minerals.net website. This new blog will be used as a way of introducing new changes and content that we have updated so you can keep track and see the progress. This will take the place of the "Whats New" section on the old site, and the blog format will also allow users to post comments.
