This is NOT a commercial

[SnappingShark]

this is not a commercial website - but just a website I want to use to show my photographs to my family back in the UK.
Flickr and instagram and facebook are good - but this way, I am able to write about the photographs too in a blog post - so I heavily edited a wordpress theme and came up with this one.

How does it look?

BrightPDX | in focus

 

[robbins.photo]

It's not a very effective commerical really. I mean I'm not even sure what the product is here. But it is better than those really stupid commercials for direct TV with the puppets. Wow.. hoewever came up with those should just be fired immediately.

Lol

Ok, in all seriousnous, it looks pretty cool - Is there any way to move the text/explanation section maybe a little further from the center? I did find that to be a bit distratcing especially in some of the photo's (Mt Hood in particular).

 

[SnappingShark]

Yeah, I played with moving it - but depending on the image, it's going to cover SOMETHING up. Although I may move it to the right instead. Thanks for the feedback on this - it's something I saw too and figured it would be distracting.

Haha I've not seen the direct TV commercials - but the Toyota car commercials with the MUPPETS - arrrrgh! now that's annoying!!

 

[JustJazzie]

I know know thing about web design, but if I was you family member I would be impressed. Lol

 

[Braineack]

took too long to load; closed tab.

 

[SnappingShark]

took too long to load; closed tab.

Yep - I need to resize my images - they're on the large side for now while I was testing locally with a handful of images.

Plus I also need to learn how to watermark my images. Hmm always things to do!

 

[robbins.photo]

Yeah, I played with moving it - but depending on the image, it's going to cover SOMETHING up. Although I may move it to the right instead. Thanks for the feedback on this - it's something I saw too and figured it would be distracting.

Haha I've not seen the direct TV commercials - but the Toyota car commercials with the MUPPETS - arrrrgh! now that's annoying!!

Ugh.. they are awful. I mean seriously, I cannot be held responsible should you decide to actually view this - really one of the worst commercials I've seen in years.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&sqi=2&ved=0CC0QtwIwAg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DhLmP73eAHB8&ei=r02kU-vEAcrJoASc4oHwDg&usg=AFQjCNGFFTQO8vTC64fEn3K7Vzby_bufKQ&sig2=VVruMWzCoAbetSBGQOPHLA&bvm=bv.69411363,d.cGU

 

[SnappingShark]

Hahaaha wow. I've not seen that before. That's not TOOOO bad though!
Tough link between marionette wires and cables!

 

[KmH]

took too long to load; closed tab.

Ditto.

 

[Designer]

It loaded in about 10 seconds for me. The time probably can be shortened by making them smaller files. I like the large size, and the overall presentation is fine, but if you had a gallery crawler people could select which ones they wanted to see. If you can do that, then you should give them more photos, too.

 

[Gregop]

Load time too long.

 

[fooby]

The load time isn't just too long, it's ridiculous. It was genuinely around two minutes for me on a slowish internet connection. I can pretty much guarantee that if people here close it because it's too long, others certainly won't wait around.

It's an easy issue to fix, you're image sizes are ridiculous for web. First of all, the dimensions are far to big. I would personally use 1440px long for full screen web, as most people use laptops and this is a fairly standard resolution. Monitors that stretch the image larger than that aren't going to harm the quality too bad. Your current ones are 6000px!!!

The other issue is the lack of compression. I downloaded one of your images and it is 4.3mb. Even a full screen image should never be more than around 300kb for web. Doing a quick search for image compression for web will give you a world of useful information about different types of compression

 

[Braineack]

you need thumbnails as well... and I despise overlays on top of images. and by that I mean the gridded pattern overtop of them.

 

[pgriz]

Took 60 seconds for the first image to load. Took another 30 seconds for then next set to come up. Once I'm "there", not sure what the site is about, or what I should be looking for. Overlays on images don't tell me much.

If intended only for family - the images are still too large for web browsing. You still need to provide the viewer ability to orient themselves (where am I? what are my options?), make choices (what are the image groups I want to expore? can I scan/skip quickly over stuff that doesn't interest me?), and perhaps even react to (comments? likes?).