Website Layout Feedback

[naaaach]

Hello TPF, I was spending my afternoon and evening today drawing out and designing an online portfolio for myself. I tried to keep it neat and clean, and need feedback!

The front page will be something like this (slideshow, fade transitions)...

I will find a better image to replace that with, I took that one over 2 years ago and I have improved, so I will upload with a more recent photo.

My pages with text will be half covered with a portrait shot, like so...

How does that look? The page width will be about 700px. I have yet to create the portfolio page but I'll get around to that when I'm wide awake...

The website itself is just a place to showcase my work, nothing more, really, so the 'Shop' link is just a placeholder.

Feedback on the visual layout would be awesome, though! Thank youuuu!

EDIT: Just uploaded a 'draft' copy! www.nachphotography.com

 

[tirediron]

I think it's a good start; nice, clean, and easy to read/navigate.

 

[naaaach]

I think it's a good start; nice, clean, and easy to read/navigate.

Anything I should add / take away?

 

[sanpan]

When I saw the screen shots, I thought it would be a flash mini-site. It would look better if it were a flash site. There are free templates of such sites on the net. You could try that.

 

[DerekSalem]

Seems like you designed the entire thing yourself (using HTML, CSS, and a bit of Java)? Looks great for how you did it but one thing is that all the separate CSS files could be in one file (at the beginning of the page source you have like 12 "text/css" listings...all of them could be incorporated into one css file to minimize load time and server load).

Otherwise love the simplistic site design. One other small thing is that for slow connections you should find a way to add in some type of loading animation. Right now I'm downloading at around 1.8Mb/s which is somewhat near my max speed and so loading the site goes a bit slow. It's a bit disconcerting to see images load in line by line like I'm on a 56k dial-up connection. Adding a little loading animation (would have to be using Java or flash most likely) would just make the site look smoother.

As sanpan said, there are a ton of java/flash templates that could be used to make the site look completely smooth. You'd retain the full functionality of what you have now (and could edit the templates to make it *look* like it does now) but you'd have a smoother atmosphere to work in. My site only uses HTML, CSS, a bit of Java, and PHP...but it's mostly because I don't use my site for a lot of public viewing. Most of it is just to show friends or people that want to see specific pictures (because, A) it's annoying to link people to flickr if you're just giving them an address to go to in real life, and B) because I already had a web host and the extra domain costs me around $0.80 a month)

 

[naaaach]

Seems like you designed the entire thing yourself (using HTML, CSS, and a bit of Java)? Looks great for how you did it but one thing is that all the separate CSS files could be in one file (at the beginning of the page source you have like 12 "text/css" listings...all of them could be incorporated into one css file to minimize load time and server load).

Otherwise love the simplistic site design. One other small thing is that for slow connections you should find a way to add in some type of loading animation. Right now I'm downloading at around 1.8Mb/s which is somewhat near my max speed and so loading the site goes a bit slow. It's a bit disconcerting to see images load in line by line like I'm on a 56k dial-up connection. Adding a little loading animation (would have to be using Java or flash most likely) would just make the site look smoother.

As sanpan said, there are a ton of java/flash templates that could be used to make the site look completely smooth. You'd retain the full functionality of what you have now (and could edit the templates to make it *look* like it does now) but you'd have a smoother atmosphere to work in. My site only uses HTML, CSS, a bit of Java, and PHP...but it's mostly because I don't use my site for a lot of public viewing. Most of it is just to show friends or people that want to see specific pictures (because, A) it's annoying to link people to flickr if you're just giving them an address to go to in real life, and B) because I already had a web host and the extra domain costs me around $0.80 a month)

Actually, I made the website with RapidWeaver. I didn't use the stock template. Instead, I made the template myself, based off some other templates, so that's why you see all the css files.

I'll keep in mind the size of pictures, what I never realized was the loading time, I was trying to get the maximum quality so it's a bigger picture resized. The page loads in less than a second, but I forgot about everyone with dial-up (whoops!).

As for Flash, welllll, I've had bad experiences with Flash, and I studied AS2, and noooo clue about AS3. I've seen Flash templates, they're clean and nice, except pretty expensive. I'm only 16 with no job, really, so spending even 50 bucks on a template would make me think it over.

And I mean, I'm paying 6 bucks a month for unlimited hosting with a pretty good host, and they gave me a free domain, which is why I made this website. No intentions of a good business or anything of that sort, really. Just wanted an online portfolio for friends and teachers, etc. to look through...