our site (designed and built by my wife!)

joecoulsonphotography · Aug 28, 2008

This was our project for this year to get this up and running to ease workflow. She had never tackled any web design at all but I think she did an amazing job on the site. We welcome all feedback.

www.joecoulsonphotography.com

bullitt453 · Aug 28, 2008

As a part-time web designer, I'll offer up some comments and critiques.

I love that the site has been layed out with div tags and CSS rather than with tables. Kudos!

The site is not W3C compliant. Here is a listing of the errors for the home page. I would recommed correcting these as compliant web design is becoming increasingly important on the net. It shows your visitors and potential clients that you truly care about your site and their experience while they are there.

The site appears to be layed out for a 1024x768 resolution, which is perfectly fine. However, I get a horizontal scroll bar when viewing the home page. Looks like it is only a few pixels too wide. Many people forget to allow for the width of the vertical scroll bar when coding the site. Common and easily fixable mistake.

Your menu changes location, or disappears completely, on some of your pages. Continuity is VERY important in web design. I would suggest placing the exact same menu in the exact same location on all of your pages, even the gallery/portfolio pages. It's okay if the menu image changes from page to page, but the text should stay the sameFor instance, once a visitor browses to the Knight's wedding page, there is no way from them to return back to the home page or to go to a different page. I know they could always hit the back button, but what if they don't want to go back to the home page from whence they came?

I would change the CSS that causes the menu items to change from italics to standard. This causes the menu to shift a little when you mouse over the links. Just stick to changing the text color when hovering over the links and leave the styling alone.

I might would consider making the portfolio menu item a dropdown list of your portfolio categories. If the visitor clicks on the Portfolio menu item, it can still take them to a dedicated link. But, if they want to go to your Commercial portfolio page, they won't have to go to your Portraits page before they can go to their desired page. For an example of this, float over the COTY link of my Mustang Club's website. (Ignore the load time of the site. I am in the process of optimizing it's graphics.)

I hope this helps provide a little insight on enhancements that can be made. Definitely off to a good start.

Regards!
-Jeff-

joecoulsonphotography · Aug 28, 2008

Thanks for the response and taking the time to look at our site. I must say that considering this was done on a 3rd party site building software and done for the very first time with no training, that it is very professional looking. I think that that error report looks like Chinese to myself and my wife, but it seems easy enough to navigate. We did change a cpl of things you suggested, Thanks again.