New website, grateful for any feedback

Scarecrow

Scarecrow

Messages
1,662
Name
Derek
Edit My Images
Yes
I have just created a new website purely for hosting some of the results from my photographic efforts.

I've tried to keep it simple and in time I will add more images to pad it out a bit.

The only additional change I am considering at the moment is to have a slide show on the home page showing a few randome images, rather than the static image that is currently in place.

I'd be grateful to hear what anyone thinks.

ScarecrowImages Website
 
It is a nice and simple design, but the first thing that jumped out at me and made me want to leave the site was all the serif font, I would suggest changing all the text to a more web friendly sans serif font, like your copyright statement.
 
Thanks for that. I'll have a look to see if I can find one I like.

ETA. All changed and now using a cleaner, more modern looking font. Thanks for the advice.
 
Don;t like the scroll bar on the side, seems to detract from your shots. It is simple but not clean in my opinion.

Roo
 
rellik666 said:
Don;t like the scroll bar on the side, seems to detract from your shots. It is simple but not clean in my opinion.

Roo
Click to expand...

Suppose he could put the navigation along the top of the page, with the category navigation at the bottom? :shrug: That would allow the everything to be centred. Also the actual photos could maybe be a bit larger?
 
Simple layout, is this intended for clients to view?

From a designer/webmaster/search engine point of view:
The site is in a frameset, frames are not the way forward for SEO, they cause hard work as your site looks like 1 page, but in google world its three, index, nav and the main content.

Css could control 1 htm page and give a better content weight and a overall cleaner coding.

sorry about being negative but want to point you in the right direction before you have a couple of hundred page site then decide to change it and give yourself few months of hard work.

If you need any help give us a shout.
 
Thanks for all the feedback guys.

I too originally intended for the pictures to be a little bigger, but the album generator I used resized them without me realising. At some point I will go back and regenerate them so that the original sized image is displayed.

David, I've heard a lot about CSS compared to frames, but I am a self taught web builder, and I've never come across a tutorial that explained what CSS is or how to use it, so I've always stuck with what I know. If you can provide any pointers I'd be grateful.
 
I've got 2 scroll bars on my screen :(
I have to use one in the main gallery section to 'reach' the across arrow.
otherwise, clean and simple, looks good :)
nice pics too.
 
Fair enough, there doesn't seem to be a lot of tutorials etc and if there are then its bitty.

style.css (or what ever you want to name it) would control every thing from layout, to styles of text, images, paragraphs etc. so changing 1 file affects the whole site.

Try and avoid tables unless its for tubular data then its fine.

what i would suggest is this.

Get your self a template that is coded in css and xhtml and as your familiar with html stuff, read through and you will see whats happening.

The site below is a client of mine who is having his site done as his current site is well below web standards.

http://green.shedsdirect.net this is held together with one .css file, although not much going on its early days yet.

pritty good supply of GNPL templates.
http://openwebdesign.org

i found this http://openwebdesign.org/viewdesign.phtml?id=5269&referer=/browse.php?page=12

i will have a browse some of my pdfs on my flash drive as i am sure i have a css and xhtml one that i can forward on.

do you use a wysiwyg editor?
 
That looks a lot better with the new font. An example of how CSS would have helped would be that changing the font for the whole site would be a case of changing one line of code.
 
PMed you some pdf books to have a read mate.

Scarecrow said:
Thanks for all the feedback guys.

I too originally intended for the pictures to be a little bigger, but the album generator I used resized them without me realising. At some point I will go back and regenerate them so that the original sized image is displayed.

David, I've heard a lot about CSS compared to frames, but I am a self taught web builder, and I've never come across a tutorial that explained what CSS is or how to use it, so I've always stuck with what I know. If you can provide any pointers I'd be grateful.
Click to expand...
 
I've been trying to get my head around this CSS thing for a while aswell, can I take it that if I am using a WYSIWYG editor, then CSS is not an option?
 
no its fine with the editors. i have tried web expression (front page replacement) and i have to say if you change say a with of a <div> in the main .htm file by draging it, it will adjust in the .css file too.

Nvu open source also works well with css.
 
Sorry for the delay in replying guys, but I was trying to do a few tweaks to the website as suggested, and I was having problems accessing it for some reason.

David, thanks for all the pointers - I will go away and do some reading and hopefully make some changes once I think I know what I am doing.

Changes for the time being that I have been able to make include making the gallery images slightly bigger and I've toned down the navigation images - reduced opacity and saturation - so that they don't compete for attention away from the main images.

As for development, I am still using Frontpage as it's what I taught myself with. Maybe I need to take a leap outside of my comfort zone!
 
If you happy with front page stick with it. changing your editor just puts another spanner in the works. If you wnt to change then epxresion web as this is front page replacement so some things are the same.
 
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