Final Project Idea

For my final project, I intent to build a site to showcase the portfolio of one of my artist friends. For the most part, artist's sites are fairly bare, mostly showcasing the works, so I am going to try to add in interactivity in an unobtrusive manner.

CSS:
I am thinking of a top nav that directs you to general pages like Artwork, Biography, Artist's Statement, Shows, Contact/Mailing List, maybe a Blog, etc. When you select Artwork, a left nav will appear with the names of artistic series (e.g. Hand Paintings, Black and White photography) - I want a similar thing for the Shows option (left nav will have show names, locations.

Thumbnails of the artworks will appear in a style much like the eCommerce project we did and when you click on them, a window will pop up to show a larger version (see JavaScript ideas).

The overall look itself will be dark/mystical to match the feel of her paintings.

JavaScript:
I noticed that a lot of people used lightbox.js for their image uploader - I want to implement this for the artwork pages.

If I decide to make a blog, I also want to use JavaScript to implement a show/hide feature for the comments left by others.

PHP/mySQL:
I will create a mailing list sign-up that will allow my friend to send out reminders about shows, news, etc. If I decide to create a blog, there will be an authentication required for people to leave comments.

I'm sure more programming ideas will come to me in the next week.