Website Review Please?

[JamieR]

I've been working on this for the last couple of hours. Can someone please give it a quick review and let me know what you think. Bear in mind that it's only just gone up in the last couple a minutes, and I'm yet to finish adding to my portfolio, and services page. The idea was short, simple and straight to the point.

Let me know what you think, thanks.

You can reach it at Jamie Rowlands Photography, or by clicking my sig.

 

[Andrew Sun]

It's easy to navigate - so good job on that.

Although there isn't much going on there because you haven't finished adding your content, it looks quite nice so far.

However, I don't like flash sites - takes longer to load, and forces me to watch irrelevant things before getting to the actual information I'm after (i.e animated logo intro). People these days are mostly impatient so an extra click just to enter a website gets on people's nerves. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm wanting to suggest improvement to your site, I would have closed it before the animation finished.

Don't worry, this isn't specifically targeted at you either - it's for everyone who ends up on the cliche Photography website system, and that includes:

01 - Flash Designed Websites
02 - Flash Introduction
03 - Music Auto-Playing (i hate this the most)
04 - Dark to Black Theme
05 - One Block of Rectangular Content Area

The only thing you don't have is music or music that auto-plays and I appreciate that =)
As I said, your website is looking good so far but it does look like a trillion other photography websites out there.

 

[BillyT]

Hi Jamie,

I agree with most of the points that Andrew made, particularly regarding the intro. You should either remove this or create a short, snappy animation that showcases some of your best work. Just adding another step for the user to get into your site does not help anyone. I disagree that flash sites take longer to load. It may with the case with some sites that have not been built properly, but most flash sites just load in the content that has been requested and can often load it faster because the page does not need to be refreshed.

Some more thoughts regarding your site. I understand that it is still under construction, but make sure your gallery pages closely match the design of the rest of your site. I felt like I was visiting a whole new website and felt a bit lost when the menu disappeared. Speaking of the menu, you might want to consider moving it to the left or along the top. Consider taking the copyright notice out of the flash area and putting it underneath in the html area, centered and a bit smaller. You should design a clean grid for all your content, headings, images etc and keep it consistent throughout the whole site. The content appears to be floating in that grey area - consider putting a box around it. The menu items should have animated rollovers.

the logo is quite hard to read with the text 'over' the acronym - consider moving the text to the side or underneath. Make sure the email on your contact page is a mailto link.

Consider adding animation between sections of your site. It might be as simple as fading the current content out and then fading the new content in, or it might involve using masks. Flash is perfect for making seamless transitions between sections on your site, so utilise that but be sure to make them short or the user will get frustrated. Also the size of your flash movie is quite small - you could easily go bigger without requiring most users to have to scroll, which might make it easier to fit your portfolio sections inside the content area and keep your menu, header etc there the whole time.

Hope that helps
--
Bill Trikojus
http://www.onlinegalleries.com.au

 

[JamieR]

Thank you both for taking the time to look over the site. I have taken into account both of your comments and suggestions, and i will be on it right away!