Website Overhaul, testers wanted

[Leon]

i've just done my 2 yearly website overhaul. can you take a little time to try it out and see if it all works with your operating system/ set-up. let me know if you come across any mistakes or what-not, It's my 1st time using Dreamweaver so there's bound to be a few mess-ups. General comments on design/ ease of use also welcome.

Dead Link Removed



ta

Leon

 

[mitch brown]

web site

great prints ! website worked with out a problem for me.
mitch

 

[david b]

On your bio page...you have a bad link to the film wasters.

 

[wfe]

Looks good to me Leon, nice simple clean design and navigation.

Cheers,
Bill

 

[rorye]

Hi Leon,
Looks great on my Mac/Safari although I also got the bad link for filmwasters.
Beautiful images, nicely done!
Best,
Rory

 

[Leon]

thanks everyone. David - all sorted, thanks for noticing

 

[david b]

Site looks great !

 

[Loose Gravel]

It works on my Windows PC Mozilla based machine. For general comments, this is just my two cents and YMMV.

The Gallery page, I find the white background of the thumbs very harsh. Also, the page turning button is too small.

The Services page, sure a lot of 'Please contact Leon' sentences.

The Bio page, consider larger text. Also, I prefer serif fonts for large bodies of text. The Kent county gallery gave me an 'under construction' notice. I'd like to see your portrait on the bio page.

 

[Rombo]

Very nice! Evrything works fine on my Mac OS X and Safari.

I think I should have page like this in the future...

 

[Leon]

thanks LG - thats very helpful. I think I'll stick with the font, ut I'll have a re-write to make things flow a bit better and get the nav buttons a bit bigger.

that said, I must take issue with you on one point ... Noone needs to see my ugly mug staring out of a monitor at them

 

[percepts]

evrything seems to work well in IE6 on W2k and Firefox2 on w2k.

I like the overall design, nice and simple and clean. However I have a few nit picky things about the design.

today approx 90% of people are on screen resolution above 800x600. 40% of those are on 1024 x 768 and the rest above. Therefore you either design for 800x600 or 1024x768. IMO 1024x768 is the way to go as in a year or two there will only be a very small percentage still on 800x600 and for photo sites you need some space for decent sized on screen images. Your design is approx 845 pixels wide which is too big for 800x600 and too small for 1024x768. I would expand the design to 980 pixels wide and use bigger images.

Also site sits on left of screen which looks a little odd. Why not centre it.
Also on higher screen res the font size is a little small.
Also the page/image navigation arrows are too small.
most pages fail html standards with minor errors. e.g. no alt specified on images.

Apart from that good work and I like your images very much.

 

[Steve Smith]

All works o.k. with Firefox. Nice, elegant, simple design.

Steve.

 

[Leon]

most pages fail html standards with minor errors. e.g. no alt specified on images.

I'n not sure I understand this -can you let me know what it means (I'm a self taught HTML dabbler)

 

[pentaxuser]

Link to filmwasters and all the other links is is fine on EI. Pity you have to go back to Gallery each time to move to next photo. The next page arrow might benefit from being bigger.

The brilliant white background tends to make the thumbnails look very dark. Might be off putting for some potential clients.

Font size in general is possibly a little small.

pentaxuser

 

[percepts]

I'n not sure I understand this -can you let me know what it means (I'm a self taught HTML dabbler)

go here and paste the urls from site into the form and see the results.
There is nothing serious and site will work fine without corrections but for completeness you may want to make corrections.
If you have a current version of dreamweaver, the validation tab may give similar info but I'm not sure as I have an older version.
Alternatively, if you have firefox, then install the "web developer" plugin which makes doing these checks a breeze.

 

[Leon]

thanks percepts - I'll look into that. Might have to go and do some more reading to understand all of this.

Pen-usr, you dont have to go back to the gallery to navigate the pics, but admittedly, the nav < >'s were a bit small - I have made them bigger now.

 

[Derek Lofgreen]

Leon,
The thumbnails are killing me. They are huge. The same size as your large version of the image. make them smaller so the gallery pages load faster. right now they are 60.5 K you can get each one of those down to 1.2 K. It will load really fast then.

The site and images look great by the way.

D.

 

[reggie]

My contribution would be to suggest a shopping cart. There at least 2 images that I'd buy if the price was affordable. I imagine that could be complicated, but there is a subscriber here who sells software to create a web site to sell photographs. It handles credit card purchases I think.

-R

 

[Leon]

Derek - I've had quite a few suggestions that the Thumbs are too small - I guess I'm just not going to please everyone.

Reggie - I take what you are saying, but it's all a bit too much for my limited design skills. I think i prefer to sell more informally and have discussion with the buyer rather than cold anonymous selling. But it's definitely something to think about in the future if things pick up.

 

[RH Designs]

Looks good to me Leon, apart from the navigation arrows - I don't know if they are the larger ones, but they're still very small at the moment. Have you considered using a graphic rather than angle brackets? The font is a bit small for me too although readable. Overall though the design is nice and clean and shows off the images well IMHO.

One more point - your picture entitled "Kisdon Force" is actually of East Gill Force . Kisdon Force is a quarter mile or so further downstream - you can see it here.

 

[Steve Smith]

Reggie - I take what you are saying, but it's all a bit too much for my limited design skills. I think i prefer to sell more informally and have discussion with the buyer rather than cold anonymous selling. But it's definitely something to think about in the future if things pick up.

There are probably too many options here but for a music website I set up for some friends, I included Paypal buy it now buttons for CD sales.

They are easy to set up and Paypal provides the coding. They enable people to pay using their credit card if they don't have a Paypal account themselves.

http://www.geocities.com/villagebikerecords/cdbuy.html

Steve.

 

[Curt]

When I put my cursor on the next arrow it obscures the names of the photo. Otherwise fine.

 

[Murray@uptowngallery]

Looked good to me. I missed the filmwasters link 'issue' as I got distracted right after trying it.

The white background did make the thumbs look especially tiny, but they obviously open up upon clicking.

The navigation arrows work fine but looked initially confusing, for lack of a better description, like stray html gibberish - more like ascii than buttons, but I caught on.

Photos are nice too.

 

[Leon]

thanks everyone. I'm onto the buttons and will try something else, but I'm trying to avoid it being over cluttered.

richard - whoops! (embarrased smiley) map reading was never my strong point!

 

[Ian Grant]

Leon, the site doesn't make best use of the screen when viewed at some resolutions. So on a 1280x800 laptop the site just sits on the left of the screen.

This site (APUG) is an excellent example of a website working extremely well at different screen resolutions. Percepts makes similar comments, he suggests going for a fixed width, a far better solution is to use percentages, I've emailed a rough example to show the differance.

Also you have a whole page for "Contact" but actually it only contains one relevant line the link to your email address. You could do this direct from the menu bar.

Ian