my first try at a wedding photo website

[Big John]

Hi everyone, I already have basic smugmug account set up to share my photos and use it as an online portfolio. However, I wanted to emphasize my wedding business more so I decided to try a website template to see if I like it or not.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated!

www.christophermuetzphotography.com (http://www.christophermuetzphotography.com)

[Brian1cj]

If I had to pick out one thought to describe it, I'd say it is very brochure-like. This isn't a bad thing, since this is the intent I believe, but a bit more interaction/information/general content would be nice.

I was thrown off a bit by "portfolio" then another "portfolio 2" page. I understand that from what you stated, you have a template for this. If you can handle a bit of do-it-yourself HTML, edit the portfolio section, merge it into one, and also try to diversify your portfolio a bit more, assuming you've got the pictures. Any photo journalism style pictures? Any candids? Abstract? Macro shots of rings on flower petals, etc?

Another important part I notice is that you have somewhat large images contained in a small box. By this I mean some of your banner photos are right-clickable to "view image" into a larger size. This is great, but for the HTML page it is on, (and to the viewer) it is very bad. What happens is that the web browser does a quick resize to fit it into a smaller area. If you know anything about resizing pictures, cubic resizes are best quality but they take a lot longer. IE and Firefox can cut corners by doing a linear resize to scale it down. This is making all of your pictures look jagged, distorted, and rough. Also this uses more bandwidth than you need to use. You (well not you, but the template) is loading these large pictures and shrinking them down to an almost unviewable size.

I mention this because as a consumer, if I see low quality, jaggy, distorted images, I'm going to pass you by, not knowing that the images are not really like that. In fact, viewing the image full size reveals amazing quality and I am very impressed with your work! The solution is to find out the dimensions on the template and resize them to fit properly. For bonus points, if each one were clickable into a larger size without doing a cryptic way of right clicking and viewing the image, that would be nice too (and it can be done).

This is a great start though. The template itself is nice and easy to navigate. I didn't review your wording and prices, etc. You can probably tell from this post that I was not an English major (computer science, actually) and so I have no right to comment on that! lol.

Brian

[Big John]

Thank you so much for the feedback! This is the kind of info I am looking for and I really appreciate your ideas.

[jerryr]

Hi !
Great Pictures !
You can also create your own template/theme via customization...
Here are plenty of examples of sites I have customized.

http://www.jrphotosandwebdesign.com/customization

- jerryr