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Just revamped my website

Light-ish letters on a dark background: difficult to read.
 
While I'd agree with Q.G. about many sites being illegible with light lettering on a dark background I don't have any issues at all with Eric's site in this respect. The balance of colours/tones is fine.

I'd suggest that the top right newsflash panel and photo on the left are not making the best use of space, that text area is rather empty.

Also the external links are better opening in a new widow, ie the Bad Dog Marketing (even though it may well be a sub domain)

Ian
 
Im on Internet Explorer, the tags seem to be in the right place. The font may give some a little trouble reading it, but it is fine for my eyes.
 
Hi Eric,

If you can stand a little harsh criticism, and are interested in the little I know about "pro" websites, I'd say

1) the pages are slow to load, which is frustrating...most sites are pretty quick to load.
2) I think you want to minimize the amount of clicks it takes to get to a picture: counting clicking the link to your website, I count three, which isn't bad, but each click is slow, so it feels more like 6.
3) The orange tags marking photos as "new" definitely do not look "pro"
4) You kind of have two navigational things going on at once, because you have all the thumbnails on each portfolio page, but then once you click in your into this linear progression of pictures. And the viewer thing takes over the window, which is sort of annoying. My preference would be to click on a thumbnail of one picture and have it take me to the album.
5) way too much text on the home page...no one cares about reading stuff till they see your pictures
6) thumbnails are too small to be helpful
7) "wild rose brewery" only has three pictures in it...kind of a dissapointing click. Seems like not a completed project, so it sort of detracts from the whole. But if you had a folder called "documentary" or "breweries" and had a whole project in there, that would be fine. Or just take the portrait picture and put it in a folder called "portraits".
8) .jpg at the end of photo titles doesn't look good.
9) I think I'd make the blog a seperate entity, that's just me.

The pictures themselves look great. Sorry to be harsh, it's a fine website, I've just spent a crapload of time thinking about websites, and you asked.

I ended up going with viewbook.com, which after a lot of improvements works really well and I think looks good.

Good luck!
 
Great comments so far.

- have removed the new tags. btw they displayed just fine in both IE and FF for me.
- The Wild Rose Brewery is an ongoing project and I will be added verbage to explain this, but I agree there needs to be more.
- Currently the images are rather large, averaging around 200K, and I intend to reduce the file size in the near future to reduce load time.
- have to figure out how to get rid of the .jpg thing.

I used Zoom Gallery but with the latest release of Joomla it no longer works. I liked that gallery but alas ....

Keep the comments coming, I have a thick skin lol.
 
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Good for you, dude. Sometimes you offer criticism after it's been requested and people freak.

Are you saving your jpegs as super high quality? If you compress them more you can decrease the file size and increase the image size without any noticeable change in quality.

I still recomend going with a "store bought" solution...photography sites are really hard and some of the services available are not too expensive and look really pro.

foliolink.com is another good example.
 
I could make it a lot more sexy if I used Flash but I'm trying to stay away from it even though it seems to be the standard for commercial photogs these days. My market is not the publication industry but the buyer of photographic art and teaching.

When I get around to resizing (compressing) my images I will be adding a copyright notice to them as well. One thing I miss from Zoom is the ability to disable hotlinking.
 
Whatever the image display software it's using Lightbox script, and with that you can add the Image title now. There should be an option somewhere in the Gallery plugin.

Ian
 
I've lightened the font for the main text areas to make it more readable. I might have to find another implementation of the lightbox program so I can add comments and take out the file names as this one doesn't have that flexibility.
 
It's all good fun Eric, I'm in the middle of a major revamp of my own website so I can sympathise. There's some stiff learning curves, even when you've taught web design .

Ian
 
The lighter font is a real improvement.
The captions however are still very hard to read.
 
If anyone is thinking of making a website, I can't suggest viewbook.com strongly enough. It's by far the cheapest of the flash solutions and is really easy to work with. I spent a lot of miserable hours trying to do my own site, ending up with something that looked awful. I'd rather be taking pictures.
 

Why choose such a 3rd rate option ?

It's extremely slow

Ian
 
Eric:

I enjoyed my visit to your site.

When you first click on the link, you get "Welcome to the Frontpage" in the tabs of my tabbed browser (Firefox). If you click on any of the internal links, the name of those links shows in the tabs.

It would be really good if "Eric Rose" appeared in some or all of those tabs.
 
I'm not going to criticize your site but wanted to say that the photography is really excellent. Nice going.
 

Ya that's been bugging me too. I have to figure out how to change it.

Thanks for the compliments Curt and Matt. If the people here like my stuff them maybe there is hope for after all.
 
I'm a graphic designer (and just a hobbiest photograher) so my perspective might be a bit different.

I feel you still need to develop some kind of brand. That doesn't mean an over-the-top logo, but you need something IMO. Yep, a graphic isn't as good for google indexing, but the current site title looks terrible and detracts from your image as a fine art photographer.

It's screaming for some nice typography which will add a sense of branding and ultimately credibility. Photos are wonderful - but the overall 'brand' is ordinary to me. Sorry if this sounds harsh.
 

Great observation. Maybe you can send me some examples of what you mean.
 
Honey I shrunk the Images, LOL. Anyway the image galleries should load faster now. I hope I haven't lost to much detail etc.

Now to start work on the descriptions.
 
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