Website Redesign - Honest C&C Please

[lesleysmeshly]

Hi,

My husband recently redesigned my website and while I do love it I wanted to hear what other people thought. The site is designed with children's photography in mind. My future goal is to strictly do babies and children so the site is geared toward that future goal.

An issue that we have is the gallery and scroll bar. Soon it will be replaced with a flash gallery that won't be cutoff at the "fold" so you won't have to scroll down to see the entire image.

One concern I do have is the number of images in each gallery (minus the maternity which is almost empty). Do you feel there are too many images in the babies, children's, and family galleries?

Are there any elements that you see that you hate? Love? Something you want to see and don't. Is it easily navigated and does it load fast enough?

Don't be afraid to be harsh, I can take it. ;)

Thank you very much!
Lesley

[dshankar]

Beautiful!
It fits PERFECTLY for your target audience.

I just don't like the font choice for the text on the bottom...

[Calogero]

I think it works well.

Very nice layout and its not to serious but not to "kiddish" either.

Works well with the target audience.

Nice layout.
Like on the price list is click and drop format.

[JoYork]

Hi,

The site creates a great impression, the homepage is very nicely designed.

However I noticed that the main logo was taking quite a while to load in, so I tried right-clicking to bring up the properties to see how big it is. I was greeted with a "Right-click disabled message". It took about 10 seconds for me to get around it and I notice the PNG file is 370k... quite big I guess, although probably not a major issue.

I would recommend you have a read through this about the right-click script:

http://websiteowner.info/articles/ethics/norightclick.asp

The rest of the site is very nicely done, and I love your images - the photography and post processing are lovely.

[Shasta]

I think it looks just right. The one thing I don't like is the image changes in the other menu items other than Gallery. In my opinion it's distracting and unnecessary. I'm not a big fan of automated image changes as well when your actually in a gallery. To automatically change images say on a homepage header is appropriate but I like to control when I view the image once I enter a dedicated area. Just my opinion but I like the entire theme, its easy on the eyes, navigation is simple and overall experience is good. I didn't have time to go through thoroughly.

[Shasta]

Oh yeah almost forgot, beautiful images. I don't think there are too many, anyone looking for someone like your self would appreciate seeing all the
images.

[vpnd]

looks good.

[solodarwest]

Looks very nice. Two comments and a question. First comment is in regards to the slide show for the galleries. I think I agree with another person's comments that it goes by too fast. I would love a pause button. Second, the thumbnails at the bottom bounce when they advance (they move left and then bounce back right a little). That was a "neat" effect, but somewhat distracting.

The photos were great and I loved the honesty in your "about me" section.

Now to my question. Your pricing was all nicely laid out. On the full resolution CD, do the pictures have a watermark or copyright on them that will show up when folks get them printed or are they just the straight photo? Just curious as to how this is typically done.

[lesleysmeshly]

Thank you all for your feedback!

JoYork - My husband tried to talk me out of the right click, I guess he was right. I will read the article and consider taking it off. I am not worried over client stealing images, more of random people stealing images and using them elsewhere. I (was too lazy) to digital watermark or otherwise watermark the images, but I will reconsider that as well.

Shasta - I went back and forth with the changing images because I too find them distracting on occasion. I ended up leaving them because my site is so simple and plain it seemed to add a bit of color and a little more fun. As for the gallery images changing, that soon will be fixed where you can turn the slideshow on and off.

Solodarwest - Thank you. The gallery will soon be changed to a flash gallery with on/off slideshow and different thumbnail navigation. That is still a work in progress.

As for the Digital Negative Collection(full resolution), the photos have my copyright in the exif data, but I give full printing rights (not ownership) to the client. On the low resolution CD's the images are sized 500x333 so not printable. Nothing is watermarked. If the client purchases the Digital Neg. Coll. they get all the edited images from their gallery on a CD to make as many prints as they like.