Website Comments

<p>Hi all,<br>

<br />i have spent the past few weeks rebuilding my website, and would appreciate any comments. <br>

http://rapscallion.eu/<br>

As an amateur photographer I initially built the website purely as an exercise to better my web knowledge. I am now quite happy with the overall format, but not 100% sure that the navigation within the site is optimal. i have 2 categories - photo's and blog - that separate, well, words from pictures. The 'words' part of the site is quite sparse at the moment, but as i have ideas I intend to build this section into my own "body of knowledge" on photography, as much for my own reference as for the viewers interest, but hopefully the 2 align.<br />Looking forward to your feedback.<br>

Regards,</p>

<p>The large images on the opening-page make it load very slowly. They also make it hard to find all the links and information at the bottom of the page.<br /> If you want a "theme" set of images on the home-page, I'd:</p>

<ol>

<li>Make them smaller</li>

<li>Use a slide-show to show them in sequence</li>

</ol>

<p>Ex: <a href="http://moving-target-photos.com/">http://moving-target-photos.com/</a></p>

<p>The "Photos" page also loads very slowly because there are many large images.<br>

A couple of suggestions for that. You could use a thumbnails for navigation/browsing. If you really like the large images, add "width" and "height" attributes to the img-tags; with that information, most browsers will layout the page and load the images "in place", which can make the page appear to load a bit faster.</p>

<p>hi geoff,<br>

not sure what happened there. the series of images stacked vertically should have appeared as a slideshow. it's fixed now so could you take another look?</p>

<p>Much better; the page seems to load faster (I suspect because only the first image in the slide show has to load for the page to render). I'd still suggest tightening up the vertical spacing on the home page. On my 1280x1024 monitor I can just barely seen the entire photo (if your target market is people with 1920x1220 monitors, that's not so much of an issue). For example, you could shift the slide-show controls to the side, or onto the same line as the "Photos Blog About" line, reduce the white-space between elements at the top of the page, or even scale down the logo. </p>

<p>One other thing. There are some pretty obvious dust spots in the sky images (ex. one about half-way vertically, and a third of the frame in from the right).</p>

<p>Hi Geoff,<br>

regarding the point re vertical spacing, it's not something that i realised, but not having any real content "above the fold" is a real no-no. i shall have to look at redesigning the front page to have more content at the top. i think i shall reduce the logo size, and also move the slideshow further down the page.</p>

<p>thanks for spotting those dust spots, they were invisible in lightroom, but exporting to jpeg seems to have made them more prominent. i shall have to clean up and re-upload, and also do a test shot in the morning to see if they are still there.</p>

<p>Everybody has their own tastes and if you are satisfied with the style you are using then be happy. In my opinion the large picture format on the Home page is very distracting. Also when you click on the links it doesn't look as if you clicked on anything because the highlight is off. If the page is running slow your viewers might be left guessing on what the page is actually doing. Look at how some popular pages are set up on the web you can even look at the photo.net page you are reading now. Notice how there is allot of clean space and everything is categorized in zones or tables. This is easy on the eyes and does not distract from the main objective.</p>