Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: spreeg on August 27, 2011, 10:55:28 pm
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Hi all,
I just finished the first version of my new website. Yes it's Word Press, Photocrati, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time coding HTML. Anyway, I was hoping to get some constructive feedback on both the site itself, and any if you have comments on any of the pictures, that is more than welcome too.
The site is:
stevepreeg.com (http://stevepreeg.com)
Thanks in advance for your advice.
Cheers
Steve
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but I didn't want to spend a lot of time coding HTML.
I don't want to be rude.. but you do know web developers use HTML editors for all but perhaps fixing bugs? It's not that much different than using a word processor at the level of your site. Is HTML one of your skill sets?
To me, what you have is a fairly ordinary web gallery with your name on it. It's nice enough, nice pics, but it's really ordinary. I'm not saying ordinary is bad, not if that was your intent.
Good luck with it.
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I will let someone else comment on the design of your website, except to say it was simple and well layed out. From my point of view, the overall quality of the images are excellent. On your auto slide shows, the first image literally disappears before it has a chance to be seen. Not sure if you can do anything about this, as it is loading when it appears. Not really a dog person, but I enjoyed the animal gallery very much. The landscape gallery is superb!
JMR
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The galleries seem empty from here (Firefox 4 on Windows XP).
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Beautiful content but the initial slideshow takes ages before starting. As others said, the first impression is what will keep potential customers on you site for more than ten seconds...
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You have some really gorgeous photos! Bravo.
I would never have guessed it's on Wordpress, and I don't see a need to apologize for that.
I will say that I do not like - in fact, hate - the automatic advance from one photo to the next. When I just get started appreciating the beauty and subtlety of a photo, poof, it vanishes to be replaced by another.
Any way, great work!
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Wow thanks all for your input, this is all great stuff. I didn't realize how slow it was loading, that's bad as I am one of those impatient people you are talking about who would not wait around. I will take all this feedback, and when I have time, try to make some changes for the better.
Thanks heaps all,
Cheers
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I had no issues at all with speed on your site. Or design for that matter. I just installed Google Chrome browser because I was having LOTS of trouble with the latest Firefox and Safari browsers on my Mac reading flash sites and playing some kinds of video. And I liked most of the images you show especially the landscape work. My only criticism is that you should think about editing out many of the pet shots.
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It's slow to get started, even on my pretty fast (20Mb/sec) broadband. I'm using Safari on 10.6.8.
I spent a while working out how to stop the (far too rapidly changing) slide show, since on my MacBook Pro the thumbnails across the bottom aren't visible and there's no hint that it's even possible to do.
Once I'd managed that, I found that the arrow keys don't work. For me, that's very bad.
Using the thumbnails is tedious: I spent a lot of time clicking on a tiny sliver of the next photo at the right-hand end.
So, FWIW, my view is that this is not a site on which I would wish to spend time, despite the many rather lovely photos. I think you could manage a lot better, perhaps with some help if, like me, you don't fancy HTML coding.
Jeremy
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From what I read on Google searches regarding browser problems there are huge difficulties with both Firefox and Safari with Macs, mostly dealing with flash based sites. Anyone who is experiencing slow browsing should check out other browsers. For me, after 5 minutes of looking at reviews on line, installed Google Chrome, and got back full functions on all the sites that were giving me problems plus faster speeds of loading images. Arrow keys not working on flash sites and woefully slow image loading (even image overlapping) was exactly the kinds of problems I had with Firefox that was driving me nuts.
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.. there are huge difficulties with both Firefox and Safari with Macs, mostly dealing with flash based sites. Anyone who is experiencing slow browsing should check out other browsers.
This is very true and these are not the only browsers that have problems. From a user perspective, there are known problems with certain browsers on different platforms and it's worth finding the right browser for the right situation based on your needs.
From a site development perspective however, it is important to ensure reasonable browser compatibility if you want good user experience, because you have to assume that your most important visitor will be using the worst setup.
In this case, while I'm running Chrome on Windows, I also experienced some issues with the speed of loading and could not see the film strip of thumbnails, which were off the bottom of my laptop screen. When I did scroll down to them, the scrolling of the thumbnails doesn't work properly so like kikashi, I only had a small amount right or left to click on.
Everything on the site could be easily handled by HTML and JavaScript. For the simple, uncluttered aspect of this site (which is a big plus), flash really isn't required and for this site, it is a hindrance to good experience (nothing against Flash. I use it in many projects).
Regards,
Peter
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Examples http://www.billatkinson.com/Homepage.pl slightly different but quick responding http://www.keithlaban.co.uk/foundpaintings.html - Keith's site is fast - HTML based.
Both sites require excessive clicking, most people will stop clicking pretty quickly unless the work is excellent. The advantage of a slide show like Steve's is that images can be preloaded.
I would like to see some information with the slideshows showing where the images were taken.
Cheers,
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From what I read on Google searches regarding browser problems there are huge difficulties with both Firefox and Safari with Macs, mostly dealing with flash based sites.
You may well be right but the simple fact is that since I don't see any problems with the vast majority of sites I visit, I tend to assume if a site performs poorly that the problem lies with the site and not with my system. Does that hurt me? Not much. Does it, at least potentially, hurt the site I'm visiting, that's trying to sell me something?
Jeremy
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I would say your site is simple and it works. I don't think you really needed to use word press to build it however. Being a web designer is one of the many hats I wear, and I can say this would be quite simple to make with css and html. Although word press could help with search engine optimization = more traffic to your site. But this also could be why your website is slower than it has to be. I would also recommend slightly larger text and increased contrast for overall readability.