jQuery gallery – History issues

[begabamboo]

Hey guys,

I’m currently working on a site that’s very close to going live. The site is basically a portfolio/store of costumes and it’s very crucial that all of the pictures and pages related to my client’s collection is accessible and viewable by as many people as possible. For this reason, I have done my best to ensure that the ‘collection.html’ (the index for her gallery) and all subdirectories will render adequately in IE6 and that the Javascript and jQuery plugins degrade well.

The biggest issue I face now is that I would like the Back button in the browser to return the viewer to this ‘collection.html’ page from any of the product pages. To try and illustrate my point, view the page below.

http://browsertest.netai.net/test/collection.html

Now if you click on any of the dresses and view their own pages, you’ll notice I have a different gallery. The problem is that each time you select a thumbnail or click on the ‘Next Image’ or ‘Previous Image’ buttons, it updates the largest image (which is wanted) but it also makes a new History ‘state’. So if a visitor viewed the ‘collection.html’ page and selected a costume to view, then they clicked on the thumbnails 10 times, it would take them 10 clicks of the ‘Back’ button to go back to the collection page, which could be confusing.

I don’t know too much about javascript and jQuery and this is in fact my first ‘real’ webite, so I’m still pretty new to everything, but I was hoping that there would be some way to have the galleries for each individual dress work pretty much as they do now, but allow the user of the site to hit the Back button and return to the ‘collection.html’ page.

Also, any comments and advice about anything on the site would be very welcome.

Thank you all in advance,
begabamboo

[cybershot]

part of me wants to say that you shouldn’t do what you want to do with the back button. When you do that you are messing with the normal navigation. Some say it’s a bad idea to change the way a user can navigate your site by throwing in javascript to do that.
As for how to get it done, you got me. Nice site though. Hard to believe it’s your first real site.

[Author]

Posts