website redesign critique

Any interested folks are invited to take a peruse of my redesigned site and provide some feedback. The URL is a beta URL - when the site is finalized, I'll be moving it to my preferred URL, so don't bookmark this:

http://scottdavis.visualserver.com/index.cfm

Anything and everything is fair game, from colors and fonts to organization of the site and the images within the categories. I haven't added any text pages yet, but those are coming.

Many thanks in advance!

I have a 24" monitor at 1900 x1200 and the images seem too small. The thumbnails are especially tiny on my old(er) eyes. If I use the zoom feature of Firefox images start to pixelate, so maybe an increase of the size would help, especially given the images which are nice .... I notice, too, that you have prices to sell prints and I think a higher quality image preview would help potential buyers.

great images of course but I find the thumbnails and final images to small.

I too, find things too small. Otherwise, it's a nice comfortable and atractive site.

Scott

I like the site and do not think the images are too small. Hit the enlarge button and they come up very nicely.
I have no negative comments as this site is very easy to navigate and close out.
I am not sure what I would change

Bob

- Titles of images should be more clearly separated from the "details". Preferably bold directly below the image, and details below it separated by an empty line if you really want to include them

- Title of image should be more prominent than title of gallery in my opinion. It is the other way around here, as the title of the gallery uses a bigger font than that of the image.

- Add a full automatic slide show function to go through slide galleries, besides Next and Previous buttons. I hate clicking each time to open a new image, and for people with RSI, it is a nightmare.

- Don't use to many levels of galleries. I prefer just 1, but two is an absolute maximum, as it makes the site highly confusing if there are more than two.

I like the "More portfolios" menu style access to the two level gallery structure. Keep it, and maybe make it more visible

After a while I found that I had to click twice to get the pictures in the largest resolution. It might be easier to just having to click them once.

Otherwise a very nice website, and great pictures!

I'll have to re-scan all my images to get them bigger - most of them were sized for uploading to APUG. I don't know if it will do anything to the thumbnail size - I can't set that. It's a shortcoming of the site template design. Slideshow option is something else to pass along to the site template designers as a request- I don't know that it is currently available.

A few things...don't ever take over the browser from the user. When clicking on an image, the browser goes to full screen removing the menus and nav buttons of the browser. A basic web design UI no-no.

Also, clicking on More Portfolios at the bottom left of an image page, overlays the choices right on top of any other text on that page.

PVia said:

A few things...don't ever take over the browser from the user. When clicking on an image, the browser goes to full screen removing the menus and nav buttons of the browser. A basic web design UI no-no.

Click to expand...

+1

Looks good to me. I love bizzard of 2010.

Jeff

Doesn't like my default browser - Looks like it relies on flash for thumbnails..

I recently redid my site with this same service, Scott, and find it easy to organize the portfolios. I don't see the "enlarge" button on yours, but the pictures got bigger when I clicked on them, and didn't really take over the browser, just opened a new window. Once closed, I was back where I started. And when that window opens the pix are a good size. I think you need to create fewer portfolios that have 10 to 15 pix each rather than a lot of portfolios with only a few pictures. Just seems like a lot of clicking to get through them all. And the first image should always be the strongest of the group, and cohesive with the rest. The first one in the Figure in the Studio is quite anomalous from what follows.

Always a good idea to have a bio, artist statement... something about yourself, too, though I suppose that'll be there when you're ready to "go live."

All in all though, these Visual Server websites are easy to use and to keep up to date. You're certainly off to a great start.

Bigger thumbnails and fewer sub-categories would be the only I would change.

Good site.

Mike

The first impression on landing is that it is quite a simple and attractive presentation. This is what is vitally important to first-time visitors.

Thumbnails are of a balanced size on 1024x768 displays and no problem visually with that. There is not of course any such thing as designing websites for wide screens: the code will take care of rendering and stretch. At the moment the page content is left-centric; I would be inclined to spread it out (centre it) over the top and add additional links; this will reduce the impact of a lot of blank area.

In the code behind the page, beef it up later toward completion with the suggested codec below:
(presently):

<html>
<head>
<title>The Flying Camera - photographs by Scott Davis</title>
</head>

to—

<meta name="AUTHOR" content="Scott Davis, The Flying Camera" />
<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />
<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-LANGUAGE" content="en-us" />
<meta http-equiv="PRAGMA" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="EXPIRES" content="text" />
<meta name="REVISIT INTERVAL" content="14 days" /> 14 days can be anything; most webbots index daily or 4, 7, 12 14, 21, 28 or 31 days.
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow" />
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Scott Davis, photography, fine art, landscape, alternative processes, display, tarot, figure studies, still life, active, Hercules, mythology, interpretations" />
<!--as many keywords as you can dream up; you never can have too many--!>

The above code is only very necessary for the home (or index) page. Robots land on that and follow the site hierarchy downward, gathering information (the "meta uptake"). So a netizen then searches in Google for Scott Davis and if your name is there, you're going to be the first search result! How that happens depends a lot on the information you put on the page and behind it (in the code).

All your images should have descriptive names (e.g. definitely not 1234_a.jpg) and alternate text (the text that pops up when the mouse moves over it) that assists not just indexing agents (Google, among) but also viewers. Each page should also have a lot of descriptive text for much the same reason just given. Webbots also index Flash content but that content must also have a descriptive identifier.

Employing Flash is a better choice than relying on Javascript, which is often blocked by browsers (by default or via user-negotiable add-ons e.g. in FireFox and Opera), leaving netizens wondering what is wrong; thus their interest wanes and they move onto a competitor's website.

All said and done I like what I see and reckon it will be a very attractive 'front door' for you as it progresses.