New website - traffic wanted.....

I've recently gone live with my own website and would really appreciate any tips and advice on how to get traffic to my site & if you had the time you would stop by my site and let me know what you think. I'm fairly new to this game, self taught and completely obsessed and loving every minute. Many thanks for looking and your time.

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The design is very nice Rebecca, well done.
It loads fast, has no flash or other junk and its easy to see the photos.

RebeccaSC said:

I've recently gone live with my own website and would really appreciate any tips and advice on how to get traffic to my site & if you had the time you would stop by my site and let me know what you think. I'm fairly new to this game, self taught and completely obsessed and loving every minute. Many thanks for looking and your time.

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Often times now a days, alls it takes is patience, because google does a great job of indexing virtuatlly every thing on the web, of course if you want it quicker, you will have to pay for advertising on the various search engines, make sure you key words that the search engines look at are pertinant to your website content, and it should take long until it starts showing up.

Dave

hi rebecca:

nice quick loading website !

when i did my website a while ago, i searched a search engine using "search engine" as the search string i got pages and pages and pages of search engines. each tends to have an "add a site" link at the bottom of the page. it brings you somewhere to enter a little bit about the website to be added and that is pretty much it.

the web-crawlers/spyders/robots &C will find you when they are let out of their cages, but you can enter the info yourself too -- and talk about a fun way to spend a few nights!

have fun!
john

Rebecca,

I had a quick look around your website. Your work is great.

When I loaded your website, I only see small grey squares. I found it irritating that I had to mouse over the boxes in order to see what your site offered. Everytime I went back to that page, I had to mouse over once again to see what the categories were. I found this to be quite user unfriendly. To be quite honest, I think you need to get rid of the mouse over effects and just display the categories as they are.

As for your site showing up in the search engines, keep in mind that search engines index on text, not on images. Hint: add captions and descriptions to your images, and add a text navigation bar (otherwise the search engines can't find your pages).

Go to Dead Link Removed and list your website under the appropriate categories. Then go to http://www.alexa.com and check your site. Several search engines use one or both of these for getting website information.

The hollow font used for your site is tough to read on Mozilla and Netscape. Other than that, the layout is clean and the site works smoothly.

Ciao!

Gordon Moat
A G Studio
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Hi Rebecca,

"...a photographer in the classic sense..." I like that, and just might borrow it for myself. Oh, and by the way, I liked your work/site as well

Murray

Your web site looks *fine* on this machine. Better and faster than 95% of the others I visit.

Good work on the site itself, and good work in the photography!

Hi again,

I just had to add that your "About" page was much appreciated. You got on one page what takes most people 4 or 5 seperate pages.

Murray

Nice website, fast and simple, your work looks interesting too. I agree with Robert about the gray boxes I would prefer having the titles of the boxes constantly visable but that just my opinion.

I enjoyed your website, you have some very good work. About the squares, I agree it would be better if I didn't have to mouse over it to see whats there. A monor detail IMO. The site is clean and classy, just as it should be to show your art.
Well done.

I would definitely go with a simpler text menu than the boxes. I do love the layout, though, and your work is very good.

I echo the positive comments above, I found the site easy to navigate and good to look at.

On thing I wondered is if it might be a good idea to have some of the thumbnails as crops of the full photos, the detail in some of them gets very teeny, could make them more eye-catching...

I think your 'Moments in Time' gallery is outstanding

Cate

I agree with the others. Nice fast website, good images, just don't like the grey boxes.

I see that you are pre-loading the images to get the speed up. A good idea which is not that common (at least, not amongst home created websites). I should try to add pre-load to my site.


Steve.

Thank You....

Can I say a very big thank you to all of you that have taken the time to check out the site and feedback to me. I will take all the comments on board and have a think about taking the advice to make the site more friendly.

The comments regarding my work are so encouraging I can't tell you. I'm self taught and you don't know if you're doing the right thing or if you're any good when you look at everyone elses work sometimes you think "nerve of me"!!

I will also have some fun using the search engines.

Many many thanks

Rebecca x

I looked at your site at home and at work. The site is relatively quick to load on dialup. You might want to consider using a larger text font. My eyes aren't bad, but that font is pretty small on my monitors.

Looks good to me Rebecca, very easy to navigate but I also don't like the grey boxes.

"where film and chemicals rule and digital/photoshop are just dirty words." You gotta just love that line.

Well done,
Peter

Hello, I'm a bit late to the party but I thought I'd add my thoughts in case they're of any use.
Google has indexed every page in your website, which is good, but I think there are a few things that you could do to increase the likelihood of your site appearing in the first few pages of anyone's search results.
You've added 'keyword' tags and included misspellings of your name, so you're ahead of the game there, however you've used the same keywords on every page. I would suggest using the existing keywords on the 'intro' page but putting different keywords on every other page, that relate to the content of that particular page (maybe including your name as well, but only correctly spelt). It is considered advantageous for the keywords to be relevant to any text in the page as well.
Similarly, make the 'title' tag relevant to each page, e.g.
"The photography of Rebecca Sichel Coates" for the intro
"The photography of Rebecca Sichel Coates Landscapes" for the landscapes thumbnail page, etc

On the actual main image pages you do not appear to have used the 'alt' and 'title' tags for the image. A friend of mine has a photography website and the majority of search engine referrals come from Google Images searches. Using the alt and title tags for the main image will help you appear nearer the top of the pile, if at all.

And finally, if someone gets referred to one of your main image pages from a search engine it is difficult to get to the rest of the site. The 'back' navigation link invokes the browsers 'previous page' function, which just takes you back to the search engine results, and it took me a couple of tries before I accidently found the 'roll-over rectangles'. I would make the 'back' text link directly to the thumbnail page and either put a visible 'home' link, or perhaps make the 'The photography of Rebecca Sichel Coates' banner at the top a hyper-link to the home page (incidently as this is a graphic you should also fill in the 'alt' and 'title' tags).

Other than that I think it's a fantastic web site. Personally I like the roll over images on the intro page, they some how increase my curiosity, but the navigation bar on the subsequent pages should be more 'obvious'.

crispinuk said:

Hello, I'm a bit late to the party

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Maybe a little bit late but very informative none the less. Very helpfull.

Thanks for posting

Stoo

Better late than never. Your comments are great and I'm copying & pasting after this to send them to my webmaking man so he can impliment the suggestions asap.

thanks for that I appreciate it very much

Rebecca

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RebeccaSC said:

Better late than never. Your comments are great and I'm copying & pasting after this to send them to my webmaking man so he can impliment the suggestions asap.

thanks for that I appreciate it very much

Rebecca

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Rebecca:

I'm probably too late for this, but were you aware that the thread tools (see the top of the page) allow you to either e-mail a page from a thread, or dowload the thread as a "pdf".

Matt