New Website Design

[david b]

Still working out a few bugs, can you all have a look and let me know what you think?

thanks.

http://www.davidbram.com/

 

[wildbill]

Pretty simple, easy to navigate, interesting images. Better than mine.

vinny

 

[Marco B]

Good simple design and good choice of font type and colors. Just a few remarks:

- Having had some RSI type symptoms due to an intensive IT job that I fortunately quitted, and also having been responsible for developing user friendly software myself, I have grown to dislike any website or software that requires more than the absolute minimum of required mouse-clicks. There are lot's of software programs and sites that require you to do all kinds of unnecassary clicks, simply because someone "forgot" to include a multi selection (shift-click) option, or other extraneous messageboxes ("Do you really want to do this?", "Yes", hell I am! )

In terms of photo websites, this translates in the following suggestions:

* Have an automatic, optional, slide show feature so users do not have to click each individual image itself.
* Have thumbnails of each image, so users can make a targeted selection of which image to view, instead of having to go through all.

Of course, these things become more important, the more images you have...

- Last suggestion: On your opening page, the main image is not clickable, most websites allow you to do something, for example by clicking it automatically go to the galleries or portfolio page the image is located.

 

[Pinholemaster]

Congratulations!

Having just redesigned my web site, I know what you've been through getting this together.

Coding makes my brain cross-eyed.

Beautiful images.

 

[Richard T Ritter]

So slow. Never loaded.
You have to remember that there are still people that have to live on dial up.

 

[Ian Grant]

On my large flat screens the navigation text is virtually unreadable, as is the text in the Bio. The Blog section is fine. It's OK on my laptop.

Seems to be a glitch with Flash on larger screens.

Ian

 

[Gary Holliday]

I like the site a lot. The main thing that annoys me is having to scroll up and down to click the numbers. (IE7) Perhaps bringing the whole design up a bit on the page will help.

I like the discreet dark grey font, but I doubt that many people have calibrated monitors so I would suggest raising the grey font more to a mid/ light grey...that should keep the text clear and not too garish.

I quite like reading some text with photographs, maybe describing why you took the shot or maybe a general statement about the whole project.

 

[RobC]

Text is virtually unreadable. Text should have high contrast with its background so you can easily see what is says regardless of ambient lighting. Yes if ambient lighting is low you can see it, but still poorly. When ambient lighting is higher then its useless.

Body text which is centred is difficult to read. Take a leaf out of the newsprint and magazine layout columns. Text lines of 8 to 10 words works best because the eye can easily scan back from right to left and pick up the next line quickly. Long lines of text make this difficult and even more so when the lines don't all start in the same place.

Scrolling images is OK but having to click on portfolios to see what they are is wrong. That should auto drop the sub menu when you rollover it. And thumbnails are really de rigeur for selecting images you may want to look at.

I like what flash can do. But 99% of the time it is used badly and purely for the sake of visual bullshit. I'm afraid your site design falls into this category. The flash doesn't actually add anything to your site which couldn't be accomplished better with pure html. And further more, because it is totally flash with everything embedded inside flash, search engines can't see any of it so it will get useless search engine indexing. Not that you bothered to put any text in it for search engines to index. Ever notice that search engines work on text searches?

So to sum up, I suspect you have seen a site which works like this and were impressed with the visual bullshit elements of it and tried to do something similar. You will find that the really sucessful sites don't do this unless they already have a high profile which makes people search on their known brand name. For the unknown this doesn't work because very few people will be searching for david bram unless you use other advertising which points them to you. If that's the case then the site may work for you once you have sorted the text contrast out. If not, then it won't.

 

[david b]

Wow, thanks everyone for checking and the opinions. As originally stated, I have a few things to work out.

Sorry to make some of you look at bullshit.

I am having the site completely done over to look like Robs.

 

[RobC]

And when you embed fonts in flash, flash takes a subset of the font glyphs and defines them as its own vectors within flash. This usually results on the font looking blurry at smaller point sizes which makes them less readable. At medium to larger sizes they work OK. So where you want to use small point sizes in flash, you should either use bitmap fonts such as those supplied by "fonts for flash" or use device fonts. That is possibly one of the reasons your text is not very clear.

 

[david b]

Rob....thanks for taking all this time to let me know what I should correct.

 

[Gary Holliday]

. But 99% of the time it is used badly and purely for the sake of visual bullshit. I'm afraid your site design falls into this category.

So to sum up, I suspect you have seen a site which works like this and were impressed with the visual bullshit elements of it and tried to do something similar. .

Rob, we are all in the visual bullshit business.

 

[RobC]

Rob, we are all in the visual bullshit business.

You speak for yourself.

Flash is a really good and sophisticated tool. But More often than not, how it is used doesn't actually add anything to a web site. And infact in most cases it makes the web site less visible around the web. It should be used judiciously where it adds something that cannot be done using html and is actually beneficial to the presentation of the content and not just for the sake of having fades and flashing and transitions for no particular reason other than visual bullshit.

 

[RobC]

Another reason why flash is not good for photography sites is because if you have each image in html with its alt/title tag properly filled with a meaningful place name or subject name, then you will receive many hits from google images where people are looking for images of places. Bury the images in flash and you immediately throw away those potential hits.

On the other hand, if your site is just targetted at image editors or galleries where you are sending them your link direct, then its OK. It's a question of target audience and for most people thats the general public and for the general public visibility comes mostly via search engines which can't see inside flash.

Google tried a while back but appear to have given up. The internals of a flash movie are too complicated for search engines to decipher efficiently enough to be able to index the whole web in any meaningful way. They would have to follow the internal logic of actionscript buried in the movie to be sure of finding everything and many flash movies load sub movies and content on the fly and that content is not necessarily accessible by the search engine. And flash files will often only execute on their owners domain so even if the search engine could look into the file, it couldn't execute it to get the data it shows.

 

[Marco B]

Sorry to make some of you look at bullshit

You're way to hard on yourself. The critics, including mine, can never be more than "suggestions", not supposed to scare you of your current design, as site design is also a personal and subjective thing.

I do like the simple layout with a single top menubar a lot, so stick with that if that is what you like too. Menu's with submenu's can be confusing, so if you don't need them out of necessity, leave them.

I am having the site completely done over to look like Robs.

Again, it's a personal thing, if Rob's site should be the "standard", I doubt, he certainly hasn't implemented all of his own critic, including the

"Text lines of 8 to 10 words works best because the eye can easily scan back from right to left and pick up the next line quickly."

recommendation. Some of the textlines on Rob's page, for example in the intoduction of the Galleries pages, are way longer...

 

[RobC]

Again, it's a personal thing, if Rob's site should be the "standard", I doubt, he certainly hasn't implemented all of his own critic, including the

"Text lines of 8 to 10 words works best because the eye can easily scan back from right to left and pick up the next line quickly."

recommendation. Some of the textlines on Rob's page, for example in the intoduction of the Galleries pages, are way longer...

Agreed. My site isn't a standard. It's an experiment and the design is only partially mine. It was taken from an open source blog design and adapted as an experiment which has never been completed. Partly because the text needs splitting into columns but most because it needs a complete rewrite to make it into a content managed site.

 

[jstraw]

The design is too tall vertically. I have to scroll to see the portfolio image navigation.

 

[Gary Holliday]

So why don't flash designers use the livebooks method of generating an html copy of the flash site? Does this work Rob?

http://www.livebooks.com/

 

[Mahler_one]

I like your site very much. I don't know why, but I have no trouble with the print, the loading, or the links. The design works perfectly well, but then again I am not a graphic artist or web designer and have none of the bona fides that others who commented have. I am on a very fast DSL line, and thus my comments might well reflect the quality of the servers that "send the site" ( sic ) to my computer.

I particularly enjoyed the M8 review....rather critical.

Thanks again David.

Edwin

 

[rorye]

Hi David,
I think the most important thing in a photographer's site is the photography, and yours is clearly excellent.
I enjoyed looking through it, and now feel like picking up my camera.
Best, Rory

 

[RobC]

So why don't flash designers use the livebooks method of generating an html copy of the flash site? Does this work Rob?

http://www.livebooks.com/

I maintain that livebooks can't interpret a complex flash movie accurately. I can't prove that but disassembly is an incredibly complex thing to achieve accurately and I simply don't beleive that they can do it accurately. Maybe just a set of links from what I have seen.

Will it work, maybe, maybe not. Depends on whether the search engines and specifically google consider the html pages to be gateway pages. i.e. pages which are purely designed for the purpose of bringing someone to a site which is not about the content of the gateway page.
Problem is that google is constantly refining its algorythms for indexing so something that works today may not work tommorrow. So its best to play safe and not try to break the implied rules. I've been caught out by this in the past. I had a site with approx 1000 visits a day which dropped to 20 a day when google changed its indexing routines.
Also, I had a look at one example from livebooks and all it does is take you to an html page which auto redirects to the flash page. That looks very much like a gateway page to me. There was nothing in the gateway page except for a menu to other pages which then auto redirect to the flash page. No images for google images etc, no body text for indexing, basically not very good. I wouldn't bother with it.

Pure flash sites are indexed by google based on what is in the meta tags of your page. But if the site is one flash movie which pulls everything else in via flash, then you are limited to the indexing provided by one set of meta tags. That does actually work, but only in a limited way. Multipage sites work much better which is why the likes of livebooks try and sell the idea. But if all they do is redirect you to the flash site then its questionable.
Time and money is far better spent on designing a site which works straight out of the box instead of relying on third party software to contrive a workaround which may or may not work in the long term.

But as I said in an earlier post, if your target audience are picture editors and galleries who you are canvassing for work, then search engine indexing is irrelevant. That I think, is one reason why many photographers have flash sites. They are not interested in selling prints to the public. They are interested in selling themselves to galleries or getting commissions from photo editors and magazines etc where they provide a direct link to their site. And their site is just a slideshow of their work.
If you want to sell prints direct to the general public then flash is not the way to go. You will do far better with an html site which has text and properly labeled images which search engines can actually see.

 

[david b]

Rob,
I think you should write an article for APUG on how a photographers website should be.

 

[Dan Henderson]

David: overall I like the minimalist look of your site. However, I fumbled around on the front page looking for a way to navigate to other pages. I finally noticed the links at the top and found my way around. I know they would clutter things up, but I think the links are important enough to be lighter in tone and more easily seen. Probably just the same tone as the web site headline. Also, when I first went to the portfolios I had to look around and finally scrolled down to find the navigation numbers to the next images. They would be easier to find if they were "above the fold" so to speak.
Dan

 

[jstraw]

Also, when I first went to the portfolios I had to look around and finally scrolled down to find the navigation numbers to the next images. They would be easier to find if they were "above the fold" so to speak.
Dan

This is what I was referring to as well. I think navigation below the images is fine if the dimensions of the Flash movie are well considered. My display is not unusually small but the navigation is just off the screen in Firefox as I have mine configured (widow maxed for my 1280 widescreen, one row of tabs, etc.).

 

[tim rudman]

Hello David
It all works well for me using Vista and IE.
All links function OK.
I like the minimal look (echoed in the man-of-few-words text). I have no knowledge of flash and techy things I'm afraid.
It was nice to see the Iceland shots too. Fond memories.

My overdue website is finally coming together so I look forward to people's comments on that too when it goes live.
best wishes
Tim