Seeking website feedback...

Hi All,

The honest and constructive feedback that forum users have given to cardiff_gareth "what do you think of my website" has prompted me to seek your views on my website too.

Will Barton Photography has only been live for about 6 weeks and I've been tweaking it a-plenty. It's a bought template site using www.viewbook.com and I've been incredibly impressed with their service so far. Things I like:

- Integration with Lightroom allows direct upload to albums/portfolios
- Simple to use interface to update albums/pages
- It doesn't looks like clikpic sites!
- iPhone compatible
- Full screen, flash display of albums/portfolios
- Loads of storage
- Reasonably minimalistic layout
- Their support help has been faultless. Viewbook are based in The Netherlands and the guys there have been very helpful and open to feedback on ways to improve their product and make it easier to personalise my site.

Things I don't like:
- Inability to maintain home page link or menu between sections of the site. I've found a solution but it's not as elegant as I'd like.
- Not a lot else...

My next job is to update some of the portfolio's. I think one or two probably need some thinning out.

I would very much welcome any constructive feedback.

Cheers!

Will

The first thing I noticed when looking at this page is that you have exposed your email address to the world which will allow spammers to send you an awful lot of junk mail.

I know there are other ways of achieving the same thing, but I have no knowledge of how it's done. I seem to recall a reference to this problem in another recent thread.

You've also repeated the problem on your contact page.

I think you are right, there are other ways of doing it but I haven't got that sussed out quite yet. It's a good point, I shall get onto it...

Ideally you'd use a contact form, so your email address is within the form code and cannot be found by visitors.

On the other hand, I've never used a contact form on my own website so my address has been exposed for 5 years or so. If you use a email provider with a good spam filter it's unlikely to be a problem. I use Gmail (via Google Apps for Domains) and I get hardly any spam. Most days none at all, on a bad day 1 or 2 might make it through. About 60 per day get filtered into Gmail's spam folder. At the beginning I was using Fastmail (who are more 'pro' and expect you to do your own spam filtering) and I got all the spam, every day. I switched to Gmail fairly quickly

Edit: I also think your images should be bigger. Watermark them if you have to, but make them bigger

I am using gmail now and only just seen that I hadn't updated the links, which I've just done now. Just pinged off a support request about using a clickable e-mail link rather than displaying the whole thing. Suspect I'll hear back from them over the weekend.

Images bigger??? Really... did you click on the image from the portfolio page - that should launch the entire portfolio in pretty much full screen mode.

Thought I'd just add that the home page only displays a handful of images in slideshow as a taster...

Sorry yes I meant the homepage. You're a photographer, show off your photos

This link might interest you:
http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/galleries/best-photographer-websites/

Look how many of them are using huge photos. Personally I think it looks great

Great link! Thanks for that Tim... just having a browse now, looks like some nice sites.

And I do know what you mean about having the pictures as big as possible and taking centre stage - the template I'm using for that home page doesn't seem to allow the images to be any bigger.

Anyone else got any feedback?

You should make the HTML modular (with templates). so that the Header and menu are separate HTML files called (included) as needed. That way you make a change to them and every page is updated.

here's some info

http://webdesign.about.com/od/ssi/a/aa052002a.htm

Whatever you do don't use frames. Horrible.

My website, http://www.smeggys.co.uk/index.php is run by php and mySQL database and I've tweaked it extensively.

Your host provider should have mySQL and PHP installed