Website Woes! Any help much appreciated

Benjamin D Green

Benjamin D Green

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Ben
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Hi all,

I'd like your opinions on my website: Benjamin D. Green Photography

I'm not happy with it at all! I'm using webplus for the design, one of my main problems is that the images in the galleries seem to be re-sized & look quite low-resolution. I'd like to swap the images around & display my best work on the website for when I start advertising proper, but I'm concerned that webplus will just re-size everything. (Maybe I should start learning dreamweaver :thinking:) Flash galleries seem to fare better, but I'd like for the site to be viewable on the fruity tablets.

If I could pre empt some of the comments I might recieve;

Flash-based galleries. I'd like to change these to java/html5 or something available to all devices & visible to google et al.

Courier New. Rubbish, will probably change to arial, as easier to read & also web-friendly.

White text on black background. I prefer this to black on white, but would like to find a happy medium.

Any help & honest advice/criticism greatly appreciated, I'm willing to start from scratch if needs be!

Thanks

Ben
 
Well I cant comment as on a Mac like many people are, I cannot believe people use flash as you are writing off a decent chunk of the market. So I cant give any feedback.

Before you ask us (or make sure you do this as well as asking us) who is your target market and ask them. While you will get some useful feedback, if your target market is females in the 21-40 age bracket (guessing they are the people looking for wedding pics in the main), then asking a forum which is more male than female is not the best research.

I made a point of asking 5 local Mums to me opinions on my site when I re-did it even though they sometimes had a different opinion to me. Massive help!
 
With regards to using Web Plus (I presume you mean Serif Web Plus), it is an excellent bit of software. I use it for my site (www.calvert.biz) including the galleries. Web Plus has a Javascript gallery option - which I use. If you go to Dreamweaver, it will do your head in - unless you have a VERY good knowledge of CSS etc. I actually went from Dreamweaver to Web Plus and its incredibly simple to use.

I resize all my pics to the right size prior to creating the galleries. When you are creating the galleries, check that in the Advaced box, the image quality is set at 100%. Plus, for all other photos, ensure that in Site Properties, the image quality settings are set at high quality. I also set the default format to JPEG.
 
Thanks for the advice, yes, I use serif webplus to do my site design, don't know too much about CSS, I liked their first album though! Having looked at David's site, I think I'm definitely going to stick with serif if I can achieve similar results.

Booda, 2 minutes! That's insane, I can't say I've ever had any problems accessing the site, it did get a bit slower when I put the flash galleries on. I'm hosted by one.com, thanks for the heads-up. Has anyone else has speed problems?

Simon, that's a great Idea. I'm a member of a few wedding forums, as I'm getting married next year. I'll certainly ask their opinions, thanks.

I'm going to be doing a considerable amount of tweaking over the next few days, if you don't mind I'll post new variations here & hopefully you can let me know what you think & help to steer me in the right direction.

Ben
 
I gave up trying to load after 30secs, assumed it was because I was on a mac.
 
Loads OK for me, bit slower than ideal, but only took a couple of seconds to load the homepage.

Your contact page background is a 1.7MB png, which took a bit to load. I would change that to a ~200KB JPEG.

I would prefer the galleries to be more, gallery-like, for want of a better term. I like to click through at my own pace, not be dictated to by auto fades. :)

cambsno said:
I gave up trying to load after 30secs, assumed it was because I was on a mac.
Click to expand...

Why would it matter that you were on a Mac?
 
Benjamin D Green said:
Hi all,

I'd like your opinions on my website: Benjamin D. Green Photography
Click to expand...


I think the first problem is thye same as almost every website gets posted on here. Lack of content on your home page. You need text, not only for googles bots to know what you do but also for viewers. They want to see where you are and what you do right away or you will find you have a very high bounce rate.

cambsno said:
Well I cant comment as on a Mac like many people are, I cannot believe people use flash as you are writing off a decent chunk of the market. So I cant give any feedback.
Click to expand...

Why cant you open it on a mac? It opens fine on my imac and macbook. Macs use flash no problem. Do you mean an ipad?

I do however agree that its best to avoid flash.
 
asphotographymk said:
I think the first problem is thye same as almost every website gets posted on here. Lack of content on your home page. You need text, not only for googles bots to know what you do but also for viewers.
Click to expand...

Also for SEO and accessibility, the text needs to be properly marked up using HTML headings where appropriate.
 
I use a mac and it loaded ok for me (under 5 secs), but to be honest my mac has been getting a lot slower over the past few weeks whic his prob another issue.
 
Jez2011 said:
Also for SEO and accessibility, the text needs to be properly marked up using HTML headings where appropriate.
Click to expand...

Yep, H tags are always important factors along with correct keyword density and positioning. To many photographers dont use there keywords or any text infact correctly and wonder why they dont rank. Thats not saying its impossible to get good serps with no text but much harder.
 
OK thanks for all the helpful advice so far.

Last night I re-jigged the website a little in serif. I got rid of the flash, so it should be faster, and viewable on ipads & iphones. I also brightened it up a little & hopefully gave it a more "clean" look. (I still need to change the dividing lines on the 3 photo slides to white, or get rid of them completely.)

Jez, I'll have to take a look at tagging my text correctly. I've put some keywords I got from the google keyword helper in the keywords tab on the page properties section of webplus. I noticed that on your site, David, you have a couple of paragraphs with keywords in at the bottom of the home page in a very light small text. I like how it is not just a list of keywords, but is a readable paragraph. Is this required for google to see my keywords, i've noticed similar things on other websites too.

Andy, with regards to a lack of information on the index page, I'd like to have my homepage images as big as possible, but I could have one key image next to some informative text that links to a full page, user controllable lightbox style gallery, and do similar with the portrait & wedding pages.

I've read that the 'about me' section of a photography website can be very important, so I may incorporate this into the contacts page.

James, 1.7Mb does seem a little massive! I'll have to sort that out, as it's a semi-transparent background image, it shouldn't need to be that detailed.

Thanks again, I'll be doing more tweaking this evening!

Ben
 
I've redesigned the site a bit more, it still needs a couple of tweaks, bur i'm a lot happier with it, just need to redesign the blog to match. I think a white background looks a lot cleaner & far more wedding-centric.

One thing i've noticed is that there seems to be what look like 'hot' pixels on some of the images in the galleries. they're not there on the original raw or jpegs.

Thanks

Ben
 
Needs needs customer text. The text at the bottom alone is spammy.
 
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Yes, I thought it might be spammy on it's own. OK what if I extended the website down a few hundred pixels & put some nice informative text about the photography we offer that is relevant to customers, yet still rich in keywords. That way I'd still have a nice full screen gallery on the home page, and visitors could scroll down to the information.

I'm ever so slightly worried that the migh just not. (scroll down)
 
Benjamin D Green said:
Yes, I thought it might be spammy on it's own. OK what if I extended the website down a few hundred pixels & put some nice informative text about the photography we offer that is relevant to customers, yet still rich in keywords. That way I'd still have a nice full screen gallery on the home page, and visitors could scroll down to the information.

I'm ever so slightly worried that the migh just not. (scroll down)
Click to expand...

The key is to write the text for the viewer not just for the search engines. Yes keywords are important but no more that a 5% density. Have some nice informative text that shows your viewers what you do. I am not againsts the keywords at the bottom but dont just list them as it will give you no benifits and may even get you penalized
 
I think this website needs a lot of work!

Firstly, I would optimise the size of your website so it's comfortable to view on the most common screen sizes. I can't view any image fully without having to scroll down on the website. I'm using a 15" MBP at 1440 x 900... I know that a lot of people optimise their website to 1024 x 768.

The pages are also inconsistent, i.e. the width of the type on wedding and portrait pages are different, as are the width of the images... There's no 'template' or format here.

I advise having your blog on your website, not on a third party website, so maybe try integrating blogspot, or use wordpress, joomla etc..

You have your own domain name, so why not a proper email address? Gmail?... Following on form that, why do you have a 1.7mb PNG as your background for the contact page!? That's going to be very slow for some people to load, it's so unnecessary and I'd say having that image is very tacky. Also, at least two of the icons on the contact page are pixelated, and they do not blend in (they have their own black background)..
 
Jay, Thanks for your concern, I've addressed some of the issues you highlighted.

With regards to the size of the website, I can't say i've had to scroll to view the whole images on any of the PCs i've used to look at the website. The website will re-size when you hold ctrl, then +/- or the mouse scroll wheel.

I'm not sure how to format each page identically on webplus, but have taken a look at the positioning of the page elements and corrected them somewhat.

I had considered migrating the blog to the domain, work in progress...

What's wrong with Gmail? it integrates nicely with my phone. (plus it's free!)

I can't comment on the "tackiness" of my contacts background image, I guess it's a question of taste. I quite like it. I like it even better now it's not 1.7mb!

The social media icons are now transparent, and i got rid of the pointless facebook one (do people still use facebook? it's soooo early 2011!)

Ben
 
Benjamin D Green said:
What's wrong with Gmail? it integrates nicely with my phone. (plus it's free!)
Click to expand...

I'm sure everyone would agree when I say that it doesn't look professional as having a 'proper' email address. You have a proper domain name, why not make full use of it? Have info@benjamingreenphotography.co.uk? or contact@... email addresses cost next to nothing these days if you buy them from 123reg for example - or if you have your own hosting, setting up an email address is free. I have an email address set up as IMAP and I can read it from any of my 4 devices.

I don't know what phone you're using, but on the iPhone you can have any email address 'pushed' to it. I expect the same with an Android phone, and probably Blackberry too. If you wanted to continue using gmail, then set up a proper one (as mentioned above), and then just have it forward to your gmail so you don't need to mess about with your phone.
 
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ah, that sounds easy enough. I've just checked and it is free to set up upto 5 emails on that domain, and I can forward to my Gmail.

Thanks.

I've also migrated the blog, that was easier than I was expecting too!

Ben
 
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