My New Website

Elrond

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You may remember but I have made a few posts in the past about designing a website and your thoughts, and I'm please to say that it is now done.

I started off with the thought of coding it all myself, even the flash that I hadn't done before, and nearly got there. The flash part was working fine with the test images but then I introduced differing sizes and came across problems. After spending ages and not knowing the resolution I had to admit defeat and went for a third party solution. I'm not happy with admitting defeat but I'm happy with what I've used and there is nothing to say I can't attempt my own one again.

As mentioned I went for flash but didn't use it for the whole site. I wanted flash as I personally prefer it over something like lightbox but on the other hand didn't want a site that took a long time to load.

I have also tried to support 1024x768 as near as I was willing to go and I know its not quite there but I didn't want to compromised the image size anymore and in the end 1024x768 isn't really that after you have taken into account menus, toolbar's and everything else. For instance someone may have the Google Toolbar that makes it even smaller. Plus I can keep track of stats and if people are using different resolutions I can increase the size.

I have tried to go for the clean look and hope it works.

Anyway, the link is as follows and any feedback would be greatfull so that I can try and improve the site if possible.

Stuart Leaver Photography

Oh, and I have also done a blog that I hope to update as I hopefully learn to be a better photographer and my journey towards that!

My Blog
 
nice site, is it a clickpic one?

nice and clean and easy to navigate

have you tried having the background all black or the same colour?
 
I like it. It's clean, easy to navigate.
The galleries are easy to use and pics are high quality.
For the Galleries home page, i'm not too keen on the purple borders of the 4 sections - but that's just my opinion. It also doesn't give you much room if you want to add more categories. It could get cramped very quickly.
Apart from those 2 small things, I think it looks professional.
Just my 2pence.
 
I think it looks great Stuart, very professional. It must have taken you hours to come up with the site name!

The blog is a good idea. I use mine a lot and find it helps to blog about a photo or collection of photos. This is really easy to do using flickr as a tool to create blog entries straight to your blog.
 
nice site, is it a clickpic one?

have you tried having the background all black or the same colour?
A bit of it is a clickpic one, the menu, but its not hosted with them as I put some of my own ideas into the design.

I gave it a go with a black background but it didn't look right, it didn't look as though it was contained in one area if you know what I mean! For example the gallery page looks right at the moment because you know where the title and menu is compared to the rest, but with all black it looked like it was all just floating! Hope that makes sense?

For the Galleries home page, i'm not too keen on the purple borders of the 4 sections - but that's just my opinion. It also doesn't give you much room if you want to add more categories. It could get cramped very quickly.
I didn't like the borders either from the start so I don't know why I didn't remove them but you saying that got me to do something about it so thanks for the comment. There now gone.

On the gallery's page there is room for six images, two rows of three (although I've not actually put six on, just empty boxes with a border to see) but I do see what your saying. The flash I'm using does have a graphical way of selecting gallery's but I've disabled that at the moment, but when it gets to it, it could be an option.

The problem with that page is that I wanted the gallery's to be a sub menu and so had to have a page to display when the gallery sub menu comes up. Maybe I'll have a look at trying something different but then maybe the menu underneath the main menu may not be so obvious. What do you think?

The blog is a good idea. I use mine a lot and find it helps to blog about a photo or collection of photos. This is really easy to do using flickr as a tool to create blog entries straight to your blog.
I'm hoping to try and put posts up as I go along and learn things and just see where it goes from there.

How can you use flickr to create entries? Or do you mean by using the photos on flickr or the RSS feed?

I have but my second entry on my blog, so if anyone wants to take a look be my guest, don't worry though, I'm not going to post every time a update it! Never know I may get some comments soon if I can reach a wider audiance!

Anyway, keep the comments coming if there are any!
 
Sorry to drag this back but I'm making a few alterations based on feedback and wanted to get your opinion on one thing I may change.

On the home page, should I leave it as changing images (flash slideshow) or change it to a static random image each time the page loads?
 
I like the flash slide show and think that you should leave be, I personally would use a larger font in the sidebar to fill it more. Love the rest of it and your photographs:smashin:
 
around half of the logo is underneath my bookmarks toolbar in firefox (if that makes sense). If i hide the bookmarks toolbar i can see it all, when i put it back i can see only half of your logo. this laptop screen is 1024 x 768 max resolution. My other laptop with 1440 x 900 screen looks fine.

Nice web site though
 
like the slideshow. the only thing i'd say is i think it might look better if all the images on the slide show are the same size rather than having a mix of landscape and portrait
 
Nice, clean site :)

Is a decent Google ranking important for you i.e. do you want your site to be found by people looking for general photography sites or even to sell your services?

If so your H1 title should be descriptive of your site but also contain any key words you want to be listed for rather than "Welcome". Same goes for your introductory line. The first couple of lines on a website should be the title of the site and/or followed by a concise description of what the site contains (if the title isn't self explanatory). Most people decide whether to stay on a site or just click the back button within the first 4 seconds so you want to really grab them immediately.

Google et all treat the first words in your site the greatest weighting, right now that's " Welcome Welcome to my website." The main title just now is pretty much ignored as it is an image and Google obviously can't read images. Alt tags for images also have little relevance in SEO terms these days as authors are stuffing alt tags with key words to get better ranked.
 

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