Refurbished my website...opinions please!

[cdifoto]

Just wondering what you all think of this. I spent a couple hours rehashing my website to try and make it look a little more appealing despite my lack of coding skills:

www.cdi-ink.com


Pretty much a complete overhaul. Please don't pick on my main page content. I just hit a roadblock and will come up with something better later. It's sorta just filler for now.

[jamison55]

Hi Don,

Just checked it out. I like the general format but have lots of suggestions:

1) The picture at the top is really cool, but I don't think it should take up half the page. Crop it down a little so that it only takes at most the first 1/3 of the page.

2) Your navigational links are to small and hard to see. Leave them where they are, bt make them bigger and brighter.

3) I don't know what you're selling until I get to the prices page. Potential clients should know the type of services you offer with every image on your site. At the least, categorize your galleries into Portraits, Weddings, and Events...

Still looks better than my website by a mile, but it needs to market you more or potential clients will turn away as soon as they get there.

[cdifoto]

Hi Don,

Just checked it out. I like the general format but have lots of suggestions:

1) The picture at the top is really cool, but I don't think it should take up half the page. Crop it down a little so that it only takes at most the first 1/3 of the page.

2) Your navigational links are to small and hard to see. Leave them where they are, bt make them bigger and brighter.

3) I don't know what you're selling until I get to the prices page. Potential clients should know the type of services you offer with every image on your site. At the least, categorize your galleries into Portraits, Weddings, and Events...

Still looks better than my website by a mile, but it needs to market you more or potential clients will turn away as soon as they get there.


1. How does it look now? I forgot I'm on a 19" these days. :D

2. I made them a little bigger but don't want to go brighter. If I do they'll clash. Any bigger and they'll be obnoxious, IMO. Small font is part of what separates a good site from a bad one, again, IMO.

3. Not sure what you mean by "don't know what I'm selling". It's pretty clear to me it's photography services. Once I have more galleries, they'll definitely be categorized. As of right now those are the only ones I have and the only 2 related are the weddings.

[jamison55]

1. How does it look now? I forgot I'm on a 19" these days. :D

Better.


2. I made them a little bigger but don't want to go brighter. If I do they'll clash. Any bigger and they'll be obnoxious, IMO. Small font is part of what separates a good site from a bad one, again, IMO.

Small font is OK as long a people don't have a hard time finding their way around. You have one shot to draw them in. Make them work too hard finding their way around and they're gone.


3. Not sure what you mean by "don't know what I'm selling". It's pretty clear to me it's photography services. Once I have more galleries, they'll definitely be categorized. As of right now those are the only ones I have and the only 2 related are the weddings.

This is the big one. Your entire brand should be built around the types of photographs you want to make money at. I have some very nice urban/landscapes that I've taken hanging around my house, but you don't see them on my website. That's not what I'm selling. As unartistic as my website is, what you see is pictures of what I'm selling. There's no doubt when you visit my site that I am a portrait and wedding photographer. If those are the type of services you are trying to sell, those are the images that should be all over you site, from the frnt page on. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the image at the top of the page. But it doesn't tell me that you are a portrait/event photographer. Just my $.02...

[cdifoto]

Better.



Small font is OK as long a people don't have a hard time finding their way around. You have one shot to draw them in. Make them work too hard finding their way around and they're gone.



This is the big one. Your entire brand should be built around the types of photographs you want to make money at. I have some very nice urban/landscapes that I've taken hanging around my house, but you don't see them on my website. That's not what I'm selling. As unartistic as my website is, what you see is pictures of what I'm selling. There's no doubt when you visit my site that I am a portrait and wedding photographer. If those are the type of services you are trying to sell, those are the images that should be all over you site, from the frnt page on. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the image at the top of the page. But it doesn't tell me that you are a portrait/event photographer. Just my $.02...

Ah ok that makes sense. I'm still working on finding a niche, and as a result my selection of images to choose from is limited. The one at the top was the best one I had to use right now. Once I get some more photos to work with, it'll get modified again.

In the meantime I've made a few more changes...adding my business name and a list of services and such on the home page.

[cdifoto]

I've made even more changes if anyone wants to see. Additions mostly.

www.cdi-ink.com is the link again.

[jamison55]

Don't know if you're ready for us to look yet, but that's what I'm talking about. Now you just need a little imspiration for yout front page, and a few unsuspecting brides...!

[cdifoto]

Don't know if you're ready for us to look yet, but that's what I'm talking about. Now you just need a little imspiration for yout front page, and a few unsuspecting brides...!

Thanks Jamie. My somewhat final revision is up now. I put the contact form on dang near every page, and I'm going to experiment with getting that simpleviewer within the format for consistency. I'll have to sacrifice on the image size a little bit but I think it'll be nicer to have the same format with everything.

I do agree that I need to get some better filler on the front. I'm thinking probably just keep a "latest additions" gallery link or 2 with teaser thumbs, and maybe some latest news.

Just gotta get out and about so I have something worth posting.

[Coltess]

I'm going to experiment with getting that simpleviewer within the format for consistency. I'll have to sacrifice on the image size a little bit but I think it'll be nicer to have the same format with everything.
I have to agree with the "same format" on all pages is a must. I managed to squeze simpleviewer into a fixed size on my site, so you're welcome to take a look and steal the code if it will work for you.
http://www.nilssons.dk/pictures/skovlunde2005/

Unfortunately, I seem not to have been able to make simpleviewer scale when it is contained within a fixed size area, so visitors to your site may need to scroll to see the pictures (that'll teach them to get a proper sized monitor ;)).
You may be able to make it (simpleviewer) resize by turning your gallery page into a frameset instead of a regualar HTML page, or perhaps use an iframe. I don't think I tried that since I dislike HTML frames intensely because you cannot link to an underlying page, but since simpleviewer won't let you do that anyway it probably wouldn't matter at all.

One more thing. I would increase the separation between the sidebar (on the left) and the main area, because they are too close right now. Perhaps you could insert a vertical black line, or just increase the seperation.

[cdifoto]

I have to agree with the "same format" on all pages is a must. I managed to squeze simpleviewer into a fixed size on my site, so you're welcome to take a look and steal the code if it will work for you.
http://www.nilssons.dk/pictures/skovlunde2005/

Unfortunately, I seem not to have been able to make simpleviewer scale when it is contained within a fixed size area, so visitors to your site may need to scroll to see the pictures (that'll teach them to get a proper sized monitor ;)).
You may be able to make it (simpleviewer) resize by turning your gallery page into a frameset instead of a regualar HTML page, or perhaps use an iframe. I don't think I tried that since I dislike HTML frames intensely because you cannot link to an underlying page, but since simpleviewer won't let you do that anyway it probably wouldn't matter at all.

One more thing. I would increase the separation between the sidebar (on the left) and the main area, because they are too close right now. Perhaps you could insert a vertical black line, or just increase the seperation.

Yeah right now simpleviewer has three links at the very top to navigate back but I'd like to get it all the same. I can deal with it the way it is, but I would prefer it to be consistent.

As for scaling, mine does scale but I have no idea what makes it scale. I haven't dissected it yet.

I agree on the spacing. On Firefox (ie anything Mozilla based) it's ok but in IE it's a tighter fit than I'd like. Just a simple matter of cell spacing. I'll do it later tonight or tomorrow after my wrist gets a rest from all that drag n drop FTP'ing. heh.

[cdifoto]

Here's the best I could come up with so far with the gallery:

http://www.cdi-ink.com/kathrod

Seems like Internet Explorer and Mozilla based browsers handle flash background colors differently, so no matter what I do I can't win unless I change it all to white. I don't want to do that. I'd rather have a little discrepancy but still live within the template.

I also still have some alignment issues with the navigation at top right in the gallery being different than the pure html pages. Still trying to sort that out. I may just make the html pages look like the gallery ones, rather than trying the other way around. Might be a no-win situation though as I'm not proficient with flash whatsoever.

PS: I may still be working on generating the other galleries if you see this within the next hour or so.

[cdifoto]

Ok aside from that alignment of the menus (occurs in Firefox but not IE), I think I'm finished. Not sure what I can do about the alignment, if anything. I see no code that indicates a difference would be rendered by Firefox. Probably just going to have to let that one go.

All of my galleries are back up and they'll be reorganized/removed/updated as I go. I'll try to keep between 9 and 12 galleries up of varying types but for now, what I have up is pretty much the best of everything, as sad as that sounds. heh.

I see a trend of providing only small images on photographer websites so I really don't think that's going to be a problem. They also load quite fast since I was able to compress to 50% quality and keep an average file size of about 20kb. Should be quite dial-up friendly.

Once I get my business phone line installed on April 3rd, I'll post that number to the site in the left column so that'll be updated too (it's my mobile number right now).

Not sure exactly when I changed my header but I have one more related to my photography now. It doesn't apply to everything (weddings) but it's just meant to be a sampling on all pages, not all-inclusive. A header that includes everything would look quite ugly, IMHO.


If anyone wants to take a look at it and see if I missed something, I'd appreciate it.