my new photography website C&C

DotOrg

hey,
just relaunched my website with a new design, wondering what ya'll think of it. I've still a bunch of things I'm going to add and tweak with it but how do you think it works and looks on various monitors, iphones and such?


http://www.AAAphotos.org

Tallon

If I'm being honest, I hate the scroll bar...

Also, they 'Home' image should be a lot more crisp? (Can't think of the word, basically, less noisy)

Other than that, it's a nice, clean, uncluttered site

dave66

I find the text "Home Photography Film ... " a little hard to read.

Perhaps the Contact Me should be "About/Contact Me" as it's the only place you mention what you do, might be worth adding something to the homepage to say what you do.

Fajitas!

Yeah, I'd find the main site links a bit hard to read too. A tiny bit darker would be great.

I'm on a 13" MPB at the moment, using Chrome - I'm finding the videos and images end up being a bit scattered over two lines, and the browser ends up jumping all over the place to try view them. It's very odd!

I'll be on a 27" monitor in about an hour and have more choice in browsers, will let you know how it looks on that.

Fajitas!

That's where both portfolio pages eventually settle

tricky D

You are using a few bad practices some of which might really annoy users.

DO NOT disable right click. That does not protect your images much and just annoys users like when they expect to get the regular 'back button' right click menu function. It also means contact details can't be copied, so have to be unnecessarily typed.

Horizontal scrolling is another thing to be avoided. Again it's not what users expect so annoys them.

Your logo should link to the homepage so you can drop the home link if you see fit.

The navigation as already noted is hard to read. Contrast is your friend, avoid grey on grey.

Blog page is way too long. Try to break it up more.

Your contact form should have the email address linked as a mailto. It should also have a form for those who don't have access to their own email client.

You have very little text on the site so there is little for the search eninges to hook onto. If you want to make some money out of the site you'll need to fix that and add a with some info on usage/licencing/pricing etc. If you're not really in it for the money, then it's fine as is.

phone skype facebook and twitter links would work better with their brand icons.

Like your work:)

ECO_Mental

I liked the horz scrolling its something different

SetOverSet

Photoshelter surveyed a number of photography buyers recently and the report included a section on portfolio websites, from pg 18, that you might find useful. It's available here via emailed PDF and includes a lot of website preferences like image size, background colour, pet hates, etc.

KarmaGarda

My honest crit is:

The scrollbar will annoy a lot of people. It even annoys me on Rankins site.

The fact you can click photos in the photography & videos page to get into galleries isn't very transparent. At first I thought you only had 4 photos in your entire gallery. Make them thumbnails and more obvious as links.

And yes, don't disable right click. A lot of people who'll browse your site will be techies and will use right click... and they know how to print screen or search their cache for the images anyway.

On the plus, I really like the colours and general appearance of it including the type of text and positioning etc.

DotOrg

thanks for all the input, some of the stuff i knew, others i didn't.

strangely, on a mac, the navigation colours looked perfect to me, but obviously things like that, look different on different monitors.

some things i simply disagree with some people on, i love horizontal scrolling, it's a really quick way of showing off lots of images.

things like the gallery navigation is being worked on, as is things like the info and text and design of the about/contact page, the video page, links to the homepage and the blog design

the right click thing is an issue, the way the site functions, is that on a huge monitor, you will get super crisp images as the images are generated from the hi-res images stored on the server. so i have to decide if i want the pictures to look amazing on hi-res screens or have them a bit more pixelated but let them be taken a lot easier

any other comments?

Fionn

I'm no expert on web sites but i'd tend to agree with other comments about the scroll bars - i viewed the site on a 30" monitor and i still have to scroll!!!


on the Global Music Photography Adventure 2011 page - should the nola-blog-.jpg image stray off the page, it looks unbalanced.

on your cantact page would you consider a form submission for people to send you mail oh and your email is going to be harvested by spam bots. Theres a prog that will obsfucate your mail addy - i've used it on a site i did, works good.

anyway just my tuppence worth!!

DotOrg

the whole idea is that you should scroll, even on a cinema screen, when you enter one of the galleries, photo or video galleries you should really be only able to see one two images on screen at once, the same way as if i had the images scrolling downwards

i've had my email address on my website for the past 9 years and i'm not spammed al that much, most spam is filtered out by excellent spam filters before i ever have to see it

i don't have a form mail cos i don't really like them, people don't get a real confirmation that the e-mail has been sent, but if you send a real e-mail you normally get a copy left in your sent items if you need to go back and check it.

i fixed that stray panoramic image on the blog, thanks for catching that one.

i still have a bunch of work to do on the website, lots more images in proper resolution so it looks better on big screens and lots of little navigational and design tweaks

tricky D

Having the email address is fine, but make it a mailto link. Spam is to be expected. The real world analogy is if you have a letterbox, you expect junk mail. The solution to that is to bin it, not block or remove the letterbox.

It's a bad idea not to have a form. Here's 3 reasons - the 3rd won't apply, the 2nd won't matter much but the 1st is fundamantal. http://keenpath.com/blog/bid/54325/3-Reasons-You-Must-Have-A-Contact-Form-On-Your-Website

Regarding the form and scrolling, you have repeatedly talked in terms of 'I don't really like them', 'I love', etc.. This is a classic designing in your own bubble, from your own perspective only, a mistake which most people make with their websites. You are only one single user of your site. Design for the masses, not you, and give them pretty much what they expect and what is in their comfort zone. Some users, myself included, don't mind horizontal scrolling, but the vast majority will find it off-putting, not what they expect and attach negativity. If you had regular vertical scrolling, there would be no issue, nobody would notice anything and zero users would be annoyed. Note: There's no page right/page left keys on a keyboard, but page up/page down are there, for good reason.

The right click has nothing to do with display, it's a function that users expect, again satisfy those expectations, don't dash them.

gl

DotOrg

tricky D wrote: »

Having the email address is fine, but make it a mailto link


Regarding the form and scrolling, .... This is a classic designing in your own bubble, from your own perspective only,


The right click has nothing to do with display

i don't have a mailto link because so many people don't use the built in e-mail client, so for those that use either a client or webmail, both can simply type the address in. yes it's a bit more trouble, but generally the people who want to work with me, aren't just casual browsers, they are people who seek me out because they know of my work


Regarding side scrolling, it's not my design, it's designed by another photographer, for photographers, http://www.digitalphotogallery.com/

It's being used by many other successful professional photographers and whilst that doesn't mean it's perfect, it's very functional and I like that it's a little different from the standard.

And the right click function is an issue, but as i mentioned, it's to do with the full hi-res images being available for users who have a big monitor, an issue that i have to try and work out. If you use a 30" monitor, the website is generating a image that's over 2000px wide. I'm not sure hat the best solution is here

DotOrg

incidentally, what does anyone think of this kind of image gallery?

http://testfullscreen.dpg.cc/gallery/