New Website Questions

<p>Hi, I have spent the last two months slaving over a new website.<br>

Firstly, I would really like some feeback its mostly Wildlife and Landscape and can be found at:<br>

http://www.akellyphoto.com/<br>

I know the images are large and unprotected, as long as their use is non-comercial, I don't mind downloads. Click on each image for a faster "Next" button to bring to next image.<br>

Secondly, I have paid particluar attention to my Keywords and have uploaded a Sitemap (in XML), yet google have not crawled my site since May 3rd (See "Cached" on google search if interested). Does anyone know how long Google takes to do this?<br>

Thanks<br>

Andrew</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Andrew,<br>

Here are my honest opinions of the site and ways to improve it.<br>

What is the purpose of the website? Neither your website nor your business card let's us know that. Are you selling your works? Are you shooting for hire? Or are you teaching other photographers? Is this purely for informational purposes? You state that you're a professional wildlife photographer, but it ends there, unless I'm missing something. <br>

You either need to use a program like Microsoft Word or get some assistance with your English. There are mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar and this doesn't make for a professional presentation.<br>

Your choices of background and font colors makes much of your copy difficult to read.<br>

There is a lot of extra, unimportant information on the site and people seldom read copy to begin with. Much of the information you provide really has nothing to do with what you're offering (which we don't know). <br>

I'm truly asking questions and stating my opinions to be helpful, thanks....-Aimee</p>

<p>Aimee<br>

Thanks for your HONEST opinion!<br>

The site doesn't say I'm a professional photographer (I'm not).<br>

The site is purely to get my work (and know how) out there.<br>

I cannot find any spelling mistakes (neither can Word) but I'm sure there are some.<br>

Can you tell me what "people seldon read copy" means<br>

Andrew</p>

<p> Andrew<br>

I like the presentation and layout in general.<br>

Only one thing really, I would scale all the pictures to the same size on the slideshow.</p>

<p>Pete</p>

<p>Thanks Pete. I wasn't sure what to do with regard to portrait/landscape pic.<br>

If anyone has found what they think is the ideal picture gallery site, I'd love to hear. Obviously, everyone will probably have different ideas.<br>

I never have the patience to wait for flash presentations myself (choose Skip!), and so I have linked each picture with the next by clicking the actual image. That way, even my impatent brother can dask through each gallery.<br>

I do think the gallery is far from perfect. I used to have thumbnails that linked to each picture from a frame at the end of the page. However, I found this really messy and it varied so much with resolution that each persons experience was different.<br>

So I love love to see what people's favourites are. Thanks</p>

<p>Hi Andrew,<br>

as a web designer with seo optimisation experience, I advise the following if you want images to be indexed by google.<br>

One of my own websites gets 80% of traffic from image searches through gooogle, even though the site is mainly text information, not about images per se'.<br>

1) Name your images with file names you would like to have them found for in search results.<br>

Use a format like: object-description-several-words-is-okay.jpg<br>

Underscore ( _ ) is treated as a word joiner, whereas dashes ( - ) are treated by search engines as a word space.<br>

2) Assign alt tags to the images will assist you rank higher for these images.<br>

3) Also alt tags assists blind people because their image readers call out what you have assigned as alt, so write alt values of up to 120 or so characters, exactly as you would like them described to a blind person.<br>

I like the grey background but your choice of font is difficult to read.<br>

Sans serif fonts are easier to read, especially on dark backgrounds.<br>

If your chose a black background then a white font is too high in contrast, so I'd suggest a grey font on black.<br>

You may like to consider re-sizing the images to a lower bit rate so they take up less data, the pages will load faster and the larger image can be of the higher quality.<br>

I like your site, keep going, if you can add rss feed to it so people (like me) will come back and visit every time you update...<br>

Good luck....</p>