These Pet Portraits make excellent gifts for any pet lover or animal owner and best of all, they are fully customizable to your liking.

Each and every print is unique and printed on highest quality poster paper or on a beautiful stretched canvas.  Check out the new website at http://www.thepetportfolio.com and send the link to everybody you know that has a pet.

For the ones that haven’t been to The Pet Portfolio, this is a 2nd site of mine where I do Digital Art Pet Portraits.  Printed on high quality canvas or posters.  Immortalize your favorite pet in a one of kind, unique pet portrait.

First things first…  You must have JAlbum and Sitegrinder (either Basic or Pro will work)

This is a not a Sitegrinder tutorial. If you want to learn how to use Sitegrinder, please visit MediaLab for more tutorials on their product. That being said, I assume you know how to make buttons in Sitegrinder.  A button is an image that is clickable and will lead you to a new page, either within your site or an external website.


In my example below, taken from my website, I have created 6 buttons for each one of my JAlbum flash galleries I am going to be making. I turned each button into a button by adding the -button hint on the appropriate layer.

I did a rollover image on my buttons so they change when rolled over on, but that is unnecessary if you just want a simple button ….

Next we are going to create our JAlbum galleries:

I find that the better organized you are, the easier this is to make,update, and maintain. So, the easiest thing to do is to make a new empty folder for each gallery you intend to make. For example, I created a logos folder, posters folder, personal folder, petz folder, etc….

Open up JAlbum and a blank screen comes up asking you drag and drop photos into main area.

JAlbum welcome screen

Before you add any images or folders, decide on the gallery you are going to create first.

I am going to start with a gallery for my logos section of the website.

Start by clicking the “settings” button on the JAlbum start screen.  On the area labeled output directory, select the new empty folder you just created for logos.  This is where JAlbum is going to put all your important files need for upload.

Close that window after you have selected your output folder.

Next, Drag and drop your appropriate image files or folders of the gallery you want to create into this main area.  Since I want to do a gallery of just logos, I only drop my logo images inside.

After you drop the first one in, it will give you prompt to name your new album project….this is not really important, so just name it what your gallery is.  This will just save a copy of your images and your JAlbum in the “My Albums” part of JAlbum, in “My Documents”, so it will be easier to change or update later.  Name your album and hit ok.  Add the rest of you photos……

After adding all your files, you can play around with different skins. Skins are basically how the gallery is going to be displayed. All the skins have different option, I personally like BananAlbum and it allows me to change the page BG color and layouts to fit my site.

When you are ready to publish your gallery, click the “Make JAlbum” button on the main screen.

Once JAlbum completes making your gallery, all the files should be in the appropriate folder we created in the very beginning of this.   In my example, here is my logos folder I created, and the new album files JAlbum added.

Now get on your web server and connect to your files in your database, wherever you site is hosted and upload that folder to your MAIN DIRECTORY…not just the contents of the folder but the entire folder….

Here is mine…along with the other gallery folders I have created. They are in the main directory of my site, not inside another folder. (My website files are on the right, desktop on the left)

Now that your galleries are in your main server and actually online for people to view, you need to have a way to access them from your site. So, open your photoshop Sitegrinder file again and we can add links to the gallery buttons.

Once you’re file is open and ready to go, go to File–>Automate–>Sitegrinder

Click the button tab at the top

When your inside the button tab options, find the the empty field for you -button you want it to link to…in my example, it is the logos button I created.

Type the web address leading to the folder you just uploaded into your server. This changes depending on where you put the folder, but in my example, the folder is in the main directory of my site, so my link is  http://www.andrewgerome.com/logos/

Once you have saved this and uploaded all your Sitegrinder files to your website, this should work perfectly and you should have no gallery errors.

As you see in the final example, that my button points directly to my web address that I just assigned to it. http://www.andrewgerome.com/logos/

That’s it! I hope this tutorial was helpful. I know the pics are kinda small, but let me know if you still have questions or are having any troubles with getting this to work.

I have just put this link to my blog on my site and I am guessing if you are reading this, you found that link. In the last few days, I have had quite a few visitors to my site thanks to the Media Lab website. Media Lab has put a link to my site on their page of Sitegrinder built sites.

If you haven’t heard of Sitegrinder, check it out. If you are a designer and don’t have a whole lot of time to learn coding and web design layout CSS, Sitegrinder may be your best friend.  Design your site in Photoshop, exactly how you want it to look, add some Sitegrinder hints and in 5 minutes, you have a fully built website with all the proper files.  This isn’t a plug for Media Lab and Sitegrinder, but people have contacted me and asked about Sitegrinder, and honestly, as a designer and not a web site coder, this plugin has saved me not only money, but time and mental exhaustion too.

Take Ownership of Your Website – SiteGrinder

As a graphic designer with an entrepreneurial  spirit, I figured I would try to design a site dedicated to pet owners and a place where they can immortalize their pets with a cool/funky/retro/urban style art print on canvas or posters.

I started The Pet Portfolio and have had quite a bit of success with it since it first started up.  I know there are alot of pet portrait sites on the net, but everybody’s style is so different, it just depends on the type of art you are looking for.

Please check out the site @ The Pet Portfolio