New (and first) Website Critique

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Phil Maddocks

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163
Name
Phil
Edit My Images
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Hi all,

This might not be the best place to ask for critique, but I am most of the way through overhauling my website from a very basic Wordpress theme to something that looks a bit more photography orientated. It would be amazing if any one here could provide some constructive feedback on the overall feel of the website.

At the moment I have very much a beginner (started a year ago) and I mainly take landscapes and photos in and around London. The aim of the website initially was to have somewhere to show some of my work, as well as to blog what I am learning and general thoughts I have about photography (this hasn't be consistent so far!). The eventual aim once I feel I am able to offer something people want to buy, would be to sell prints. The theme I am using does have the functionality to do that directly in the site.

Anyway, any helpful feedback would be great!

Link: www.philmaddocks.com
 
I like it. It's colourful, responsive, and simple.

It tells me you're a landscape photographer.

Minor comments is the haphazard use of capital letters in your image captions, and the lack of a contact page. Admittedly there's social links and comments on the blog, but if you direct people to your website and they like what they see, they can go no further at the moment. As to the capitals, your writing (on the blog) is pretty good, so it's just polish really (coupled with my pedantry).

(Win 10 desktop PC, 3840x2160)
 
Hi Phil, you'll have to optimise each page for search engines (something I'm useless at) and I'd say you really need to concentrate on a USP, not just for your website but also your photography as a whole - considering you say you mainly take pictures of London I can't see any in your gallery, it's quite a random selection of pictures you've chosen to show. If you can separate portfolios into countries/counties etc or themes I think it would work better, but you need a quality body of work to do that. I'd say rather than focussing on marketing your images at this stage, study the work of the best in the genres you're interested in and work on your own photography style. You're doing very well for someone who started a year ago, but to consistently sell you're going to need to continually improve on composition, editing and use of light. I always say it's worth buying competition books such as Landscape Photographer of the Year and Outdoor Photographer of the Year (the latter is especially inspiring, though no book this year - there's an online gallery instead) - if you can reverse engineer what successful photographers are doing and apply it to your own work it will help enormously. The likes of legendary landscape photographers such as Joe Cornish and Charlie Waite are always worth studying too.
 
Personally, I would bin the gear page. It doesn't add anything to your site and to be honest, your gear isn't pro gear. Now before you jump down my neck, no you don't need pro gear to get pro images, but to anyone who knows a little about photography it may be off putting to any gear snobs. I perhaps haven't explained that too well, but hopefully you will see what i am getting at. Rest of it looks ok to me.
 
First impressions are good, i like it, simple and clean, all seems fast enough and loads fine my end.

i do like the blog style, decent headings and simple to navigate (I've only read a couple, so not gone through into content to much)

Agree with the above "gear page" not really useful, to those that don't know it means next to nothing (although does show a degree of "pro" gear, for those not in the know) im just struggling to see how it benefits anything?

and the gallery, again its a little muddled and no real theme, its also going to become really heavy to load following the "dump pics here" routine, I would personally add headers/categories like the blog style, sunset/sea/night sky/landscapes etc or whatever you choose, down the line when you might have 500/5000 pics it will be easy on the loading time for mobiles and nicer to navigate.

Overall i like it, if I stumbled across it, id probably have a little look around, which is the main aim, keeping traffic interested and clicking on different pages.

just my two cents
 
Thank you all for the great feedback, it is much appreciated.

On the Gear page - the reason for having it was that I had seen similar on other photography websites and its purpose was to be used to drive affiliate revenue (which is how I have mine set-up). But I do agree that it can detract from the images if you see I am using entry level equipment. Maybe it will work better as a once a year blog post to talk about what I am using and what I've considered.

On the galleries - Again agree with all the comments - So far I do have Lightroom collections for Landscape and City photography but I could look to break it down further once I have a bigger collection of images.

Appreciate the comments on the blog - I've struggle a bit to keep this as consistent as I would like but the main aim behind doing it was to write about what I was learning about photography in hope it would bring people to the website
 
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