General comments, based on viewing only a few pages by skipping the long loading home page: Simple elegant layout, with consistent color/font/menu on every page. Text font size too small, color blends in with background color, making it hard on my aging eyes.
Search box a nice touch. Adding an explicit GO or SEARCH button, a la Google which we are used to, would help.
Search Results page: After searching for "landscape", only a handful from a dozens of landscape images showed up in the results listing. If this is intended, why? The text color of visited links are dimmed, making them even harder to separate from the background color. I nearly missed the difference. Same comment for the Menu bar on the left. You may want to check my recent post on marking visited links:
http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index....60&start=60Landscape gallery pages: For me, overlaying the thumbnails on an enlargement does nothing positive. The enlargement does not display long enough for me to appreciate it. Then it turns into a distracting background. Some serious thoughts had gone into designing a large gallery, which can be challenging. There are some nice touches, but also a few things worth considering:
- Let the viewer know how many total images are in each gallery.
- Adding the gallery title on the thumnail and enlargment pages would help.
- Hovering over a thumbnail brings up a medium sized enlagement. Very speedy and nice touch, allowing me to randomly preview any thumnail. But I discover this quite by accident, the second time on the page. Also, does this not discourage viewers from viewing the real enlargements? Perhaps a note about hovering and a larger hovering preview (and eliminating the real enlargments entirely) is the solution.
- The currently/last viewed thumbnail is dimmed. Not sure what purpose that serves.
- I expect to see a thumnail page when clicking on set_2, but no cigar. Set_2 thumbnails are displayed via the on/off switch at the left, ONLY after displaying an enlargement. The 22/31 thumbail does not display.
- The forward/backward buttons work fine for sequential viewing of enlargements. But there is no easy way for me to skip forward/backward by a few images. While we may want/wish/hope other viewers to sequentially view each and every image of our large galleries, I don't think that many do. I, certainly, do not. Do you? This is one of the hardest things to design well for a large gallery. My comments about hovering over the thumbnails may very well be the solution.
- When viewing the last enlargement 36/36 of set_1, the forward button automatically advances to the first image 1/33 of set_2. Backward button then returns to 36/36 of set_1. Very nice touch again, and not properly handled by many large gallery designs. But, in between 36/36 and 1/33, I don't get to see the thumbnails of set_2! This is another difficult challenge for large gallery design: how to display a large number of thumbnails.
- The right red verticle on/off bar is very confusing. A more conventional up arrow button near the forward/backward buttons may be more intuitive.
Many similar comments were raised and buried in the old thread I suggested. The books recommended there also address many usability issues. Since that thread three years ago, we now have Lightroom web gallery templates which solve many of the large gallery design issues mentioned here. Apparently I have not been the only one on the Holy Grail. The challenge now is how to customize these templates so that they don't look the same for everyone. But I don't expect web designers to take that on. These templates take care many of their heavy lifting coding/designing tasks.
