I hope our resident Website Maven Chris_T will take a look at it.
Definitely not a maven. In fact, I'm not even Jewish
From my WinXP, IE7 and 21" CRT full screen. After taking a quick look at the site, I found myself dropping down the same old comments I had made repeatedly, such as:
- I consider a splash page is a waste. (And this one has TWO!) The b/w image led me to expect a site about b/w.
- The gallery page's header looks drastically different from the other pages', creating an inconsistent look. The global navigation menu at the bottom disappears. The lone back button brings you back to the splash page, oh no! (I suspect all these are caused by using a gallery template.)
- The vertical thumbnail scroll is a reasonable solution for a large number of thumbnails. But when not all the thumbnails are loaded, sliding the scroll bar all the way down would create blanks without any indication that loading is still going on.
- The thumbnail scroll would work much better if the thumbnail of the current enlargement is in the middle of the group, allowing a viewer to see a few previous ones and a few to follow.
- The enlargement scales as the window size changes, while the thumbnail column size remains unchanged. This work quite well, until the window size gets somewhat small.
- What's the difference between View Slide Show and Play Slides?
- The images can use some captions and titles.
- There are too much white borders around the enlargement.
- The About page has minimal info.
Many such comments are covered in great detail in a wonderful book I recently read. The authors generously publish it in its entirety online here:
http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/index.htmlAlso, I will start a new topic making a few suggestions to both the site review requesters and critics.
BTW, following my own suggestions have created many new but better_now_than_later challenges for my own site design.