my own Website

Hey folks,
here is my own Website.

Please have a look and give me some tips and don't hasitate to post you critism.

http://www.rene-photography.de/index.h​tml

My Questions to you are:

1. What did I miss?
2. What would you add?
3. Do have this Site availeble on mobile devices like the Ipad, I guess, I need to change it to regular Picture Gallery, right?
4. If I change the Picture Gallery to a regular Gallery, what possibilities to I have to protect my pictures e.g. forbit the right mouse click?
5. Should I make two diffrent editions? So that the visitor can click the american or the german flag to see the page in his language or should I stay with it like it is right now?

What do I plan to change?
1. I plan to add more pictures for sure.
2. I want to have an private area with login. So I can post some picture only people I give a password to, can see it. How can I do that? Should i make the useraccounts or should I let them do that, so, that I need to accept them?
3. I will change the banner (pictures I made with the text)
4. I will change the watermark to anything looking better.

thanks winam

Cons:
- Looks very dated

- Logo image doesn't look very artistic considering it's a photography page. Either go very simple text logo or something fancy. Or if you want the current style, make the image background match the site background.

- Too large font size for text content.

- No "under construction", it's either ready, or it's not. A site 'under construction' should not be live.

- Poor choice of background colour. Try and choose something easy on the eyes and only darks unless it's monochrome.

- Bottom page navigation link colour almost matches background colour hence rendered useless.

- Header image changed completely on all other pages and does not match homepage.

- Too much content for each single page due to the double language content. I would suggest you have an extra sub-directory, name one /de/ one /en/ and put each language site in the other and have a language choice link on an entry page or your home page.

- Guestbook is just an image.

- Links on some pages have red colour which is eye hurting with the blue background.

- Get better gallery code. Remove red watermark from your images, it's really unnecessary for such small images. Or lighten using monochromatic text, right now it's like reading your website name with a fancy background instead of viewing a picture.


In all honesty, the site needs a LOT of work. If you are unable to code yourself or do much, hire a professional or work with some HTML templates available online. All the best.

tman2782 wrote in post #13096909
Cons:
- Looks very dated

- Logo image doesn't look very artistic considering it's a photography page. Either go very simple text logo or something fancy. Or if you want the current style, make the image background match the site background.

- Too large font size for text content.

- No "under construction", it's either ready, or it's not. A site 'under construction' should not be live.

- Poor choice of background colour. Try and choose something easy on the eyes and only darks unless it's monochrome.

- Bottom page navigation link colour almost matches background colour hence rendered useless.

- Header image changed completely on all other pages and does not match homepage.

- Too much content for each single page due to the double language content. I would suggest you have an extra sub-directory, name one /de/ one /en/ and put each language site in the other and have a language choice link on an entry page or your home page.

- Guestbook is just an image.

- Links on some pages have red colour which is eye hurting with the blue background.

- Get better gallery code. Remove red watermark from your images, it's really unnecessary for such small images. Or lighten using monochromatic text, right now it's like reading your website name with a fancy background instead of viewing a picture.


In all honesty, the site needs a LOT of work. If you are unable to code yourself or do much, hire a professional or work with some HTML templates available online. All the best.

+1.

Okay,
I changed the header, the color and the determination of "German" and "English".

Took the pictures off for now. Will upload them later again.

very poor. sorry I think it needs lots of work, if you would like a designer and a coder than PM me. I can help!

or try using www.wix.com to build a website yourself!

Best of luck!

winam wrote in post #13097815
Okay,
I changed the header, the color and the determination of "German" and "English".

Took the pictures off for now. Will upload them later again.

It's great that you've taken the initiative to correct, but you have to be able to see other comparative websites and then see your own and realise what your website lacks. If you do this, you will see what it wrong with it. There is nothing wrong with hacing a website, but when you're presenting an art form like photography, you are automatically expected to have a similarly decent website. Hence I strongly suggest you use options that are available on the internet like HTML themes, a lot of these are free.

While you have corrected some issues, they aren't necessarily the way I would've corrected them.

As much as I wish I could've said it is satisfactory, the truth is it's simply not. The whole site can be hand coded in Notepad in no more than 15 minutes. I will see if I have any old html templates I have lying around, I'd happily give them to you.

tman2782 wrote in post #13100115
As much as I wish I could've said it is satisfactory, the truth is it's simply not. The whole site can be hand coded in Notepad in no more than 15 minutes. I will see if I have any old html templates I have lying around, I'd happily give them to you.

That would be so great

I find that the top image has much too much jpg compression. The artifacts aren't pretty and don't look good on you as a photographer as a result. Perhaps make the files that form the top banner on the main page a few kilobytes more. The website is plenty fast anyway.

winam wrote in post #13100742
That would be so great

I'll look for them when I get home and hope I find any. You have to realise though, that these will be strictly HTML/CSS layout templates, they have no gallery coding etc in them and would have to be added in later by you or by someone with some know how.

Send me a PM with your email address.

ok, i took it down for now. will get back online when i'm ready

Okay, what about now? Http://www.rene-photography.de

Hi Winam.
Not sure where to start.
1. Not keen on the black bg.
2. Can't read the 'posts' 'comments' as the font doesn't contrast with the black
3. Huge amount of empty space under image.
4. Why is there a count down to Xmas?
5. Why do you need a time in different parts of the world?
6. Your Hamburg pic doesn't show
7. Your navigation would be better across the top rather than having to scroll down the page
8. There seems to be a lot of unncessary stuff on the page that detracts from your main purpose.

Sorry, not very positive

Hannya wrote in post #13331577
Hi Winam.
Not sure where to start.
1. Not keen on the black bg.
2. Can't read the 'posts' 'comments' as the font doesn't contrast with the black
3. Huge amount of empty space under image.
4. Why is there a count down to Xmas?
5. Why do you need a time in different parts of the world?
6. Your Hamburg pic doesn't show
7. Your navigation would be better across the top rather than having to scroll down the page
8. There seems to be a lot of unncessary stuff on the page that detracts from your main purpose.

Sorry, not very positive

i concur.

- a lot of uninteresting, unnecessary stuff (world time, hh-weather, christmas-clock, visitors etc.).

- the menu drops to the bottom of the page (VERY bad !)

- you seem to want to sell stuff, so you definately need some legal info (Impressum), that is VERY important

- the image presentation is terrible and immediately made me stop looking at the pics (gallery itself, image transitions etc.)

- the header-image is much too big

about the menu:

- i don't really care for things like "my equipment, newsletter, future changes, guestbook"

- link to "gallery" and again a link to "hamburg impressions". just go with one or the other (gallery makes more sense, if you add more pics in the future)

So i see have to eork on that agsin

A bunch of comments.

• Home page is too busy, too many weird things
  
• Remove the weather, world clock, countdown to xmas eve
  
• remove the country website counter
  
• remove the future changes, and my equipment pages. Only you care about your equipment, let your photos do all the speaking. Not sure why you have a future changes page since it doesn't seem like you did any of the suggested changes you got 2 months ago so you aren't keen on constantly updating your site
  
• your red website address stamp on your home page image is not doing you any favors. Create a watermark that would be towards the bottom or a corner of the image not across the center and bold red.
  
• I now see your home page image is actually your "banner". It is way too big and forces viewers to scroll down to see the gallery photos when in them
  
• why are thre 2 slide shows when I clicked on the Hamburg gallery? This is very confusing. Do you have only one gallery?!
  
• when I move my mouse of the pages in your navigation area, the whole line turns white and I cannot see what the text says anymore
  
• why do you have "gallery" in the navigation selection if your only gallery is Hamburg?