Website feedback?

[amolitor]

Gotta run fetch my kid, but it looks really nice, to these eyes.

Information header isn't a link at all any more, though?

Love the postcard look to the contact page!

 

[jowensphoto]

gosh darn it.

i'll fix that.

 

[Big Mike]

I don't know if it's just me...but it's loading very slowly. The header shows up...and then it waits or partially loads the rest of the page. I'll check again later.

 

[OLaA]

I think the font used in the navigation menu could be changed to something more simple. The cursive is a nice touch but using it more sparingly I think would go further. Plus simple text for navigation just makes sense. You normally want to use design fonts for well.. the design portion of the site. Also noticed that on your emblem/crest on the home page the "jo" looks like "ja". Not sure if this matters to you or not. These are just small things, and as a whole I really dig your site. Nice job.

 

[jowensphoto]

I don't know if it's just me...but it's loading very slowly. The header shows up...and then it waits or partially loads the rest of the page. I'll check again later.

Thanks for moving this It may not be - I need to transfer to another host. GoDaddy is notoriously slow.

 

[jowensphoto]

Gotta run fetch my kid, but it looks really nice, to these eyes.

Information header isn't a link at all any more, though?

Love the postcard look to the contact page!

Funny, I didn't notice the postcard look... but got the same response from someone else!

 

[Big Mike]

I don't know if it's just me...but it's loading very slowly. The header shows up...and then it waits or partially loads the rest of the page. I'll check again later.

Thanks for moving this It may not be - I need to transfer to another host. GoDaddy is notoriously slow.

Check out Hostgator.com

 

[runnah]

Image compression is your friend! Do you have photoshop? Make sure to use the "Save for web" utility.

 

[Derrel]

On the play-through on your main page, the fifth slide in the slideshow has the lace silhouette photo and a hat + pregnant belly photo, paired. I think the hat photo needs to be moved to the left, since the image is "pointing" to the right, and the lace silhouette photo points left. Positioned as they are it looks, well, wrong, as both images point off the page and away from one another. Swapping positions on those will tie those two together harmoniously.

 

[runnah]

This image for example is 1,381 kb, which is huge for a website. You should be able to get this down much smaller at least 200-300kb.



This image is 298kb and its hard to tell the difference.

 

[sm4him]

I'll let the others speak to the design elements.

I've only looked at the "About Jess" section so far, other than the Home page (which, like Big Mike, I had trouble ever getting all the photos to load). Here are some of the typo/grammar errors I found. I hope they don't sound like nitpicking; it's just what I do for a living, and I believe correct grammar helps lend an air of professionalism to a website.

Under the "Two Important Elements" section, in the section about Love:
What are dough eyes??? I don't mean to sound facetious here, I'm truly not sure I know what you have in mind. I *think* you may mean "doe eyes," that look that a female deer may give its mate, batting its lashes like it's in LOVE. "Dough" is what you make bread with.

Also in that section, where you say "even a first time mother embracing her baby-bump...": "first-time" should be hyphenated, baby bump should not. Best rule of thumb is to hyphenate those situations when they are used as an adjective, but not when used as a noun. That's not hard and fast, but it's often true.

In the Nostalgia section, second sentence: You say, "The photos To acheive this, I use a lot..." It looks like you probably just rewrote that and accidentally left "The photos" in.

Last sentence in the 3rd paragraph ends in mid-thought, "to hang on your wall or"...

In the last paragraph, second sentence, you have "I wouldn't be able to do continue doing what I love..." Again, it looks like you just rewrote that and left the word "do" in there accidentally.
Finally, in the very last sentence, at least on my monitor, it looks like "Check out my page" with a huge gap between words. Then I notice some little scribble of something between the last two lines of text, which is the "Contact" link that you mean to have show up in that huge space between words. it may match up well on your monitor, but it's not working well at all on mine.

Again, don't take the nitpicks the wrong way--editing is just what I do, and if I can help out, I will!

EDIT: Having looked at some more of it, one other thing that really strikes me is I don't see anywhere that says WHERE you are. That would seem especially important on the Information page and the Contact page--if I'm looking at your Information page and thinking I might hire you for my portraits, it would help to know whether you're remotely close to my area or not.
Also, that little poster image on the Information page, with the black silhouette image that says "The Little Black Book Collection?" These old eyes can't read ANY of that *except* the heading. I can tell there is a lot more text on it, but I have NO idea what it says.

 

[runnah]

Fun tool...very useful.

Website speed test

 

[kathyt]

Spell check is your friend: "consistency" not "consistancy."

Remember a long time ago whenn you told me I couldn't spel? I am stil mad about that.

 

[Designer]

Please take my comments as coming from an old fart.

Personally, I am not a fan of slide-show first pages. It moves kinda on the slow side if you know what I mean. Then there are about half a dozen maternity shots, which frankly are boring to me. So if you're going to do a slide show, make it more eclectic and random in content. Your style seems to show through, which is probably o.k., but when I go to your gallery, there are precious few new subjects to peruse.

The lower-case "o" looks like an "a". I think the best improvement will be to get more subjects up there, and perhaps venture out more in style. While you may wish to focus primarily on pregnant women and babies, you should get more and varied portraits up.

I think having a "fine print" line is cute, but change the font color to give more contrast against the background.

Try for more consistency in font types, as in the "contact" page has a very hard NYTimes font for the boxes, while everything else is script. I like the script, but your phone number should be written out with the dashes between sets, as are most phone numbers.

I know it's fixable, but for me to change the window size to get the whole page in is a minor hassle that I would rather not have to do. Any other website automatically fits my window.

Congratulations on the new website!

 

[jowensphoto]

Thank you all! I am getting ready to head out so I can't respond to each comment, but I'll be taking everything into account!

Doe eyes... lmao. I'm such a dork.