Website - C&C appreciated

[smakelijk11]

Hi,

I would love to hear the lowdown on my website. Is there anything I can do to make it more user friendly? I'm looking for constructive criticism.

It's www.gourphoto.com

Thanks,

Shaun

[HSK]

I think you should also link those 3 pictures on the front page to the relevant pages. I automatically went to them and clicked but realised I had to go to the links below.

[smakelijk11]

excellent advice.. thanks HSK - I'll fix that right away... anything else i should correct on the site ?

[int2str]

Also the pictures are way too large. Resizing them with the <img> tag causes huge size overhead and slows down the site by a lot. Same goes for the logo, which should also be transparent.

They layout is very bare as well.

[smakelijk11]

Any comments about the main site itself?

[Mark Anthony]

make it viewable to people that don't have flash, not everyone has it, while it certainly has it's place your gallery looks entirely flash dependant which is restrictive.

[int2str]

Honestly, there are so many things wrong with the main page already, I have a hard time looking past that:
- Images are WAY too large
- Hidden text is not useful and causes accessibility issues
- Useless auto-generated JavaScript bloats the source
- Plain layout

Your flash site fares *somewhat* better, but I still find it a bit troublesome. Some pointers:
- Flash is not very accessible and you don't make any concessions here
- Music on a website is always a crowd divider. I personally hate it...
- The navigation is *fairly* elegant, but somewhat unintuitive
- The up/down scrolling is really hard to find and doesn't support the keyboard either

As far as editorial comments:
- I'd change "Investment" to "Pricing"
- Your "About" tells me nothing "About" you ;). A more recent picture and more relevant stats would be more important to me. You can move your stories to a "Philosophy" section for example.
- In the "How long have you been a photog" FAQ, I'd reword it more positive. It seems like you're being defensive in that post.

[smakelijk11]

Thanks int2str!! I appreciate the fact that you took the time to do that for me. That is what I want.. you gave me some good pointers. And although I disagree with you on some of what you said, there are things I totally agree with you on. Constructive criticism is how I will improve my site. Anyone else with some opinions on how I could improve?

Shaun

[int2str]

Shaun,
I'm playing with your site a bit right now and will post a suggestion later.

What do you disagree with?

[int2str]

Shaun,

I've quickly coded up your site using (hopefully) proper HTML+CSS. The net benefits include:
- Much smaller code (<1kb vs. >7kb)
- Very accessible and search engine friendly
- Improved page loading time
- Less browser memory used
- Image size reduction (472kb -> 125kb)

Your site when opened in Firefox used 30MB of memory!! Yes, that megabytes! After the changes I made it uses less than 1 megabyte. And that makes a huge difference (at least on my notebook).

Also, I made the logo transparent so you could change the background color any way you like.

Here's what I came up with:
http://eisenbach.com/~andre/posted/gphoto/

Just a suggestion....

And just for archival purpose, I've attached a before & after screenshot.

[smakelijk11]

Dude!! I don't think I disagree with you on anything anymore... you are DA King des Kings as they say in slang french :-) The page looks great. I just need to change the picture now though, because it doesn't have the same effect. Sorry, it's a Canadian joke...

Shaun