Web site finished

Phil V said:
Finished?
And you're still promising 'iconic' images of weddings?

Even if you do want to advertise wedding services, you might want to build your portfolio before you promise 'great' and as I said before, hit the worlds top 10 list before you start promising 'iconic'.

As I said before, I'm a wedding photography nerd and I can think of one iconic wedding photo, (princess Di leaning towards bridesmaid).
Click to expand...

Iconic
adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an icon.
2. Art. (of statues, portraits, etc.) executed according to a convention or tradition.
 
Chaz Photos said:
Iconic
adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an icon.
2. Art. (of statues, portraits, etc.) executed according to a convention or tradition.
Click to expand...

When people read iconic they're going to expect something special. You can argue the meaning all night, but you, me and everyone else here know the truth. And we all know there's nothing iconic in your gallery.

It's your call, but the website is a whole story and IMO you're letting it down by saying one thing and showing another.

Btw the second half of that meaning whilst appearing to simply pertain to traditional art, specifically mentions Ancient relics in other dictionaries.
 
neil_g said:
It's still a bit clunky, the pages all shift around slightly when navigating around.

Also, can I ask what the point of the qr code is?
Click to expand...

It was put in as an example of a widget to show Chaz.
 
neil_g said:
Ah right. Just didn't see the point.. I can't scan it with my iPad as I'm browsing from it etc :thinking: :D
Click to expand...

Chaz is just learning how to use wordpress. If you see his other thread I set up a test site on my server for him and have been helping out with the technicalities whilst he learns it. He's doing all right, having never seen it before a week ago.
 
Organnyx said:
SEO? - I was of the impression from some of the WP proponents that it was utterly magic, did it all for you and ensured you no 1 in all the listings - back in the days of html sites we'd put what we wanted the search engines to see in black type on a black background to save being seen as being over-verbose on the front page.......SEO is important, but should not override that first good impression - can one of the SEO experts not suggest a way round it?
Click to expand...

If you did the black on black thing now your rankings would suffer in a very big way. The simple answer is good well written text. Nothing wrong with being verbose, as long as its good reading and informs about your site
 
cowasaki said:
Chaz is just learning how to use wordpress. If you see his other thread I set up a test site on my server for him and have been helping out with the technicalities whilst he learns it. He's doing all right, having never seen it before a week ago.
Click to expand...

(y) And a great help this man is too. With out him I still be in the starting blocks.. Thanks a Lot.....:clap:
 
cowasaki said:
Chaz is just learning how to use wordpress. If you see his other thread I set up a test site on my server for him and have been helping out with the technicalities whilst he learns it. He's doing all right, having never seen it before a week ago.
Click to expand...

no thats fine, i just assumed "finished" meant the site was done.

nothing but constructive comments from this corner (y)
 
Organnyx said:
My apologies - it's Javascript, done to look like "Flash" - go for simpler! The gimmicky flying photo grates a bit at first, after three or 4 images you get fed up and go elsewhere...........(especially when it hangs off the bottom of the page)

SEO? - I was of the impression from some of the WP proponents that it was utterly magic, did it all for you and ensured you no 1 in all the listings - back in the days of html sites we'd put what we wanted the search engines to see in black type on a black background to save being seen as being over-verbose on the front page.......SEO is important, but should not override that first good impression - can one of the SEO experts not suggest a way round it?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately there are some poor WP templates, a good one does indeed make the SEO stuff easy, allowing for global page naming conventions and even recommending good practice. However I'm seeing a lot of bad ones too lately, the modern equivalent of the black text trick is to add 'location' details in the footer. But organic well written content with a little thought and effort is still the best option for SEO.
 
Phil V said:
Unfortunately there are some poor WP templates, a good one does indeed make the SEO stuff easy, allowing for global page naming conventions and even recommending good practice. However I'm seeing a lot of bad ones too lately, the modern equivalent of the black text trick is to add 'location' details in the footer. But organic well written content with a little thought and effort is still the best option for SEO.
Click to expand...

So what is a good template and what is a bad one?
Any examples? also I guess it what you do with the template as well that matters. A good one badly used will not look as good as may be a bad one well used.
Just a thought.
 
Chaz,

Unfortunately you have to pay for a lot of the better templates. The company that make simplify are called D5 they do "professional" versions of their templates too. The template you are uaing's pro variant allows such things as turning the three images on the front page into links.

Also a lot of the pro templates will have things in them that allow you to change settings by options where we have had to add code to change them on yours.
 
Chaz Photos said:
So what is a good template and what is a bad one?
Any examples? also I guess it what you do with the template as well that matters. A good one badly used will not look as good as may be a bad one well used.
Just a thought.
Click to expand...

That was purely in relation to the point about SEO, I think vanilla Wordpress handles SEO quite well, unfortunately some templates stifle the SEO abilities of Wordpress whilst making the template look snazzy. But some help guide the user into good practice - that's worth paying for if SEO is important to you and you don't have the time and patience to put into it.

I haven't looked at your site from an SEO viewpoint. And you can't really expect me or anyone else to look through the thousands of templates and rate them for SEO ease?

With the right amount of skill and a suitable brief, you can produce a good photograph from a P&S, but a DSLR makes it easier and is more flexible.
 
What Darren said.

In my template, I can set a global Site title that is good for SEO, so every page is called 'County Wedding Photographers Town'. Any page title I write prefixes this - So I can get 'Reportage wedding photographers County - County Wedding Photographers Town', with no effort, other pages will match other search terms (Google will look to match what people search for with strings of text on your site).
The search terms which that fits include:
  • Reportage wedding photographers
  • wedding photographers
  • photographers
  • wedding photographers County
  • photographers County
  • County Wedding Photographers
  • Wedding Photographers Town
  • Photographers Town

Your title is optimised for
  • Chaz Photographics (will people be searching for this)
  • Photographics Devon (will people be searching for this)
  • Devon based (will people be searching for this)
  • Devon based Photographer (will people be searching for this - maybe, but why make it difficult)
  • Photographer (will people be searching for this - Yes, but it's a popular term, it'd need a lot of support)
  • based Photographer (will people be searching for this)
Some of your pages have titles that include the words wedding and portrait, but can you see how you could make them work harder for you?

The number 1 Google spot for "wedding photographer devon" has 'wedding photographer in Devon | wedding photography' as his site title.
Of course the site titles are just the first step - have a look at Mikes new post, he's running a Webinar tonight.

And I still have an issue with the copy on your weddings page - but it's your site and you're free to do what you want.
 
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Reagrrding the font, i notice that fonts that look ok on my mac, can look very sharp and jagged on my windows machine.

The revers can also be true, fonts on macs can look blurrier than on a windows machine.
 
I get the feeling I may be "wasting my breath", but here goes anyway - I thought that it would now be "finished", but all the grating problems are still there....... First of all the nav bar is relatively difficult to see - the three "boxes" are still there under the main picture (which you have to scroll to get to) - when you get there, they aren't "clickable" (to my mind, they are totally superfluous).
So I put myself in the position of a typical mug punter looking for a wedding photographer (1440x900 screen, average 5mbps connection) - I click on the box at the bottom of the page - no dice, so I rootle about in the difficult to read nav bar, and eventually arrive on the right page - (whoopee!) to be greeted by a not so iconic "greengrocers' apostrophe" (plurals do not require one!), THEN I'm wondering if the fella can take any good photos, and find that rather than immediately accessible wedding pics, I have to rootle about in the gloomy nav bar to find the "gallery" section - I click on one of the thumbnails, and at relative snails pace it "grows" in an alarmingly wobbly manner down the page (following a quick flash of "loading"), and it settles half on, half "off" the bottom of the screen - clicking a few others have them all doing the same........

By which time the mug punter will have given up, gone elsewhere and booked somebody else.........
 
It is interesting what you say, as I can not see why the menu is so hard to find or see.
AS for screen size I see that most are 1920 x1080 with 1900x01200 \nd 1680x1050 making up the biggest % of viewing screens res. I not I have only had ONE 1440 x900.

I note that the one log on with a screen res of 1440x900 which was a Macintosh with language set to en-us Browser Safari 534.57.2 log in with btcentralplus.com
if this is you, it is showing that, you visited one page and did not stay oh and the page was the bio page.

So I do not know what you issues are but I look at all the info I can re my site and have been changing it as everyone should, to make a web and not tweek it is not a good thing.
So when I say it was finished in the main it is... now I am tweeking it as I listen to comments made not just here but with others as well, some who have a greater understanding then I will ever have.
Oh the ' have gone and before i read you mailing...
 
Chaz, you can get tied up in screen resolutions all day, but punters will try to click on the images and titles on the bottom of the screen, because once they've scrolled down to see the image, they can't see the top menu bar - and those images just look like they should be clickable. Even at 1080 tall on my work monitor I have to scroll down enough to see the image that the menus disappear.

You can either accept this as a fact and put some links in, shorten the header area to keep the menu in sight longer or accept that you're frustrating users. Or you can keep ignoring people who are genuinely trying to help you until it's obvious we were right from your web stats.

Whilst you're looking at stats for screen resolutions, bear in mind that your average tester here (photographer) has a different screen requirement to your average punter.
 
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Chaz Photos said:
It is interesting what you say, as I can not see why the menu is so hard to find or see.
AS for screen size I see that most are 1920 x1080 with 1900x01200 \nd 1680x1050 making up the biggest % of viewing screens res. I not I have only had ONE 1440 x900.

I note that the one log on with a screen res of 1440x900 which was a Macintosh with language set to en-us Browser Safari 534.57.2 log in with btcentralplus.com
if this is you, it is showing that, you visited one page and did not stay oh and the page was the bio page.

So I do not know what you issues are but I look at all the info I can re my site and have been changing it as everyone should, to make a web and not tweek it is not a good thing.
So when I say it was finished in the main it is... now I am tweeking it as I listen to comments made not just here but with others as well, some who have a greater understanding then I will ever have.
Oh the ' have gone and before i read you mailing...
Click to expand...

Just because somebnody has a 1920 x 1200 screen does not mean they are viewing in full screen, because i certainly don't!

Take a look at joemcnally.com, very simple, scalable, short front page

EDIT

Make the images at the bottom of the front page clickabel, or even get rid of them!

Use less fonts, maybe simplify down to 2, one for headers, one for text.

Get rid of the full stop after your telephone number
Put spaces in the mobile phone number, and use the same size font
Get rid of the postcode, i don't see a need for it. I can see you are in devon.
Make the email clickable
Shorten the list of services
Get rid of the photo count in the gallery page
Get rid of the 'whoosh' when clicking a photo, reminds me of a bad powerpoint presentation!
Review the thumbnails, they have a lot of cut of heads
Why have 2 pages of thumbnails, with only 1 picture on page 2? (http://www.chazphotographics.co.uk/id3?album=3&gallery=5&nggpage=2)
Maybe merge the gallery and services pages?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Rapscallion said:
Just because somebnody has a 1920 x 1200 screen does not mean they are viewing in full screen, because i certainly don't!

Take a look at joemcnally.com, very simple, scalable, short front page

EDIT

Make the images at the bottom of the front page clickabel, or even get rid of them!

Use less fonts, maybe simplify down to 2, one for headers, one for text.

Get rid of the full stop after your telephone number
Put spaces in the mobile phone number, and use the same size font
Get rid of the postcode, i don't see a need for it. I can see you are in devon.
Make the email clickable
Shorten the list of services
Get rid of the photo count in the gallery page
Get rid of the 'whoosh' when clicking a photo, reminds me of a bad powerpoint presentation!
Review the thumbnails, they have a lot of cut of heads
Why have 2 pages of thumbnails, with only 1 picture on page 2? (http://www.chazphotographics.co.uk/id3?album=3&gallery=5&nggpage=2)
Maybe merge the gallery and services pages?
Click to expand...

Thanks you for your comments as for fonts I only have two as far as I know one for titles and one for text. there are some things I can not change but will look at all possibilities
I can see some of the other points which I am looking at now. Thank you for being constructive.
 
Not sure if this has already been said but the fonts on the contact form are really small and I struggled to read them. The font for the body text is also as bad, try using a clear font type instead.

Firefox 16 @ 1280x1024
 
Chaz Photos said:
Thanks you for your comments as for fonts I only have two as far as I know one for titles and one for text. there are some things I can not change but will look at all possibilities
I can see some of the other points which I am looking at now. Thank you for being constructive.
Click to expand...

No worries Chaz,

i built a wordpress site a couple of years ago and they aint simple! Regarding the font, i was also referring to font sizes and the font used in your title.

Good luck
 
Rapscallion said:
No worries Chaz,

i built a wordpress site a couple of years ago and they aint simple! Regarding the font, i was also referring to font sizes and the font used in your title.

Good luck
Click to expand...

Well my name is a logo as for the rest its all down to H1 H2 H3 H4 and paragraph settings
 
Chaz,

I was looking at a way to change the images to links....


This is the code that does the images

Code: 
...rest of code...

[COLOR="yellow"]$fboxclm = array("1","2","3");

foreach ($fboxclm as $fboxn) { ?>
<span class="featured-box"> [/COLOR]

[COLOR="blue"]<a href= '/links/featured-image' . $fboxn . '.php'  >
[/COLOR]
[COLOR="Red"]<img class="box-image" src="<?php echo of_get_option('featured-image' . $fboxn, get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/featured-image' . $fboxn . '.jpg') ?>"/>
[/COLOR]
[COLOR="Blue"]</a>[/COLOR]

[COLOR="Yellow"]<h3><?php echo of_get_option('featured-title' . $fboxn, 'XXX'); ?></h3>
<div class="content-ver-sep"></div><br />
<p><?php echo of_get_option('featured-description' . $fboxn , 'XXX'); ?></p>
</span>
<?php }  ?>[/COLOR]

...rest of code...

The code in yellow and red is the existing code....
The code in red is the line that displays the images 1,2,3
The code in blue is what I have added to turn the image into a link.

The code in blue works if I make it:

Code: 
[COLOR="Blue"]<a href= '/links/featured-image1.php'  >
[/COLOR]   ....display image....
[COLOR="blue"]</a>
[/COLOR]

or

Code: 
[COLOR="Blue"]<a href= '/links/featured-image2.php'  >
[/COLOR]   ....display image....
[COLOR="blue"]</a>
[/COLOR]

Just need a way to insert the value of '$fboxn' into the filename......

I don't actually work with php so not sure on the syntax.


It can be seen to work as it currently just goes to the wedding section for any of them....

Code: 
[COLOR="Blue"]<a href= "/wp-content/themes/simplify-child/featured-image.php"  >
[/COLOR]
[COLOR="Red"]<img class="box-image" src="<?php echo of_get_option('featured-image' . $fboxn, get_template_directory_uri() . '/images/featured-image' . $fboxn . '.jpg') ?>"/>
[/COLOR]
[COLOR="blue"]</a>
[/COLOR]
 
Chaz,

I've done it with a bit of a kludge, I've basically taken it out of being a loop and done all three separately.

It now works. To change the location of the click you need to change the web address inside the files "featured-image1.php", "featured-image2.php" & "featured-image3.php" in the editor of the child theme as I have explained previously...
 
Chaz, i see 3 fonts
'Poiret One'
Anaheim
Geneva
 
I was surprised to NOT find a set of wedding thumbs or even a link to the wedding gallery from the "Weddings & Christenings" page.
I had to go to the gallery button at the top and then choose wedding gallery, this is not as logical as going to the "Weddings & Christenings" page and expecting a load of clickable thumbs.

Text after a full stop should begin with a capital letter.
". bringing to life those tender ..." = Bringing
 
cowasaki said:
Chaz,

I've done it with a bit of a kludge, I've basically taken it out of being a loop and done all three separately.

It now works. To change the location of the click you need to change the web address inside the files "featured-image1.php", "featured-image2.php" & "featured-image3.php" in the editor of the child theme as I have explained previously...
Click to expand...

(y) Thanks for that all looking good now.:clap:
 
Ulfric M Douglas said:
I was surprised to NOT find a set of wedding thumbs or even a link to the wedding gallery from the "Weddings & Christenings" page.
I had to go to the gallery button at the top and then choose wedding gallery, this is not as logical as going to the "Weddings & Christenings" page and expecting a load of clickable thumbs.

Text after a full stop should begin with a capital letter.
". bringing to life those tender ..." = Bringing
Click to expand...

Thanks two Proofreader missed that one... also good comment (y)
 
Chaz had changed one of the lines in the theme's child theme, I've fixed it now:

Code: 
/*  This is the font changing bit  */

body, input, textarea{
    color: #00000;
    font: 15px "Roboto Condensed", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
    font-weight: 400;
    line-height: 1.625;
    word-wrap:break-word;
}
 
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