Hello everyone.
I'm Gary's dad and he's given me permission to contribute to this thread.
First, I'd like to thank you all, for taking the time to take a look and offer your comments and criticisms. It is invaluable to us, in order that we can continue to develop the site and try to present it in a way that is acceptable to the majority of people.
You will all realise I'm sure, that like all types of presentation, design is very much a personal thing and with that in mind, it is inevitable that what some like, others won't.
I'd like to share with you some of the things I've been doing this weekend as a result of your collective comments.
First I'll deal with the most controversial; the buttons! As I designed them, I take full responsibility for their acceptance - or not. I liked them, as did noneforit, but the consensus is negative, so as soon as I get time, I'll redesign them to hopefully better reviews! Ironically, they are the same size as those on the original site, but with more rounded corners and larger text. It's the text I feel, that may be the major cause of dissatisfaction.
Probably the next most serious (if not the first) is the pixelated logo. We agree with you 100%. It was robbed from the original site, which did not span 100% and quite honestly, we didn't realise what a mess it would look and hence we screwed up. This is Gary's department and as soon as he has redesigned a new banner, it will be uploaded. While I'm on this subject, a million thanks to DiddyDave, who spotted "Portait" rather than "Portrait". I don't know how many people we've had look at this site, but you are the first sir, to spot such a glaring error!
As far as coding and html validation is concerned, one of the design goals was getting rid of all the crap that site generators (like Dreamweaver) produce. In other words, I wanted "clean" code throughout. It was also desirable, that the site would work cross platform and to a great degree, that's worked. I've been testing it this weekend in Safari (it works well) and a friend of mine tested it on his mobile (symbian), and I also know it works on the iphone. As with all design, there are trade-offs and on balance, I think it's about right. To get back to pure validation, it mostly fails on lack of alt tags, though there are other issues. This was quite deliberate, as it seemed pointless to me, having a photography site where you couldn't see the images. Why bother to visit? The alt tags, although being small in the scheme of things, were simply an unnecessary overhead. The other point I would make, I've yet to come across a web site that validates 100%. I'm sure they exist, but most don't. For example, I was on a major commercial USA computer site last night that had nearly 270 errors! That's not to say it's not desirable, but it's not a priority either.
Thanks for pointing out the table problem; that's been rectified and was a result of copying and pasting sections of content from he old site, which included that code. My subsequent review, missed the code and strangely, it didn't show up in my testing.
As far as loading speeds go ding76uk, I think you have either a slow connection or something wrong. While I admit to many problems, speed of loading is not one of them. However, your comments regarding how the gallery's are structured, is good sound advise and we'll look at that in the future. In fact, as a direct result of your further comment about lack of focus on weddings, we're planning yet another roll out in the future, which will effectively split the site into two parts; one dedicated to weddings. Thank you for that.
To DuncanDisorderly and Jacob, I think I've found the cause of the problem you found with the page splitting and fixed it. The page will still contract below 1024x768, but that's how it's designed.
Jacob, if you have less than 1024px width or you don't have your browser fully open, that will happen.
However, I can't at the moment reproduce your javascript error Duncan, but I'll look into that further.
To anyone I haven't addressed personally, your comments are just as valid and some will have been addressed by others commenting on the same subject. So thank you all for your valuable contributions.
My best wishes to you all and an early Happy Christmas.
Paul.
