Website Feedback

markjtrickey

Hi All,

I have recently been getting more feedback from people on my photos (I take photos of peoples dogs mostly at our local dog park) and have started selling photos off my website. I'd like to bring it to the next level and perhaps offer more personalized shoots. Any feedback on the website design, information I could include (or not), marketing , etc would be greatly appreciated.

I'm also interested in how to start driving people to the site. Right now it is mostly word of mouth.

Thanks,

Toshido

Slideshow seemed real slow to load, maybe just me.

Clicking on the slideshow brought me to a gallery and then I got lost from there.

Your home page (slideshow) has a real nice look to it. Simple clean, professional looking header and nav bar. Then you lose it completely when someone goes to your galleries, why?

Okay I am still looking at your website while I am writing this so stick with me here.

Using the nav bar the site looks very nice. Maybe add a bit more under services so someone can actually hire you to take pictures rather then just find the ones you have already taken.

Looking at your galleries i see you have right click protect on but you have easy sharing enabled. Not sure why you would provide easy links to digital files and not allow right click protect. Most likely an oversight.

Breadcrumbs.... I would suggest having your "home" destination in your breadcrumbs actually be your galleries page. Just saves an annoying click in getting back to your root gallery page.

With the navbar my preference is to only have breadcrumbs when going deep into a website. So i personally only have breadcrumbs in my galleries. They are just not needed anywhere else.

The mouseover text box when you hover a picture is annoying in galleries like your contact page. not bad with picture galleries, I am actually thinking about enabling them again in my galleries, we'll see...

Weird... Now I am trying to go back to the confusing ugly page I first went to when clicking on the slideshow and it is taking me to.... Oh.... it take me to wherever the photo is....

So will be a huge pain but at least one of your photos in your slideshow takes me to a different style of page and then I can not navigate back to your proper site. Sorry I can;t be more specific about that.

markjtrickey

Feedback
Thanks for the feedback. Not sure how I can have the slide show load faster, although like you it does appear to be slow to to load for me.

I would have to think about the right-click protection and the easy sharing options. To me the right click protection is more about informing a user that the picture is copyrighted rather than preventing them from stealing it. There a a number of ways to get the photo if one wants. But the point is well taken and I should think about if I really want sharing enabled.

I agree with the breadcrumbs and the link back to galleries as opposed to home. It's a matter of getting the CSS time in to address it.

I'm not really happy with the way my galleries page looks, but perhaps a little more detail as to why it looks so bad to help point me in the right direction in fixing it.

Once you are in a gallery proper does that look ok to you, or is it just the categories/galleries page?

The Services I have to work at. I'm fresh off the boat so to speak so I'm not quite sure what and or how to present a list of services I would like to offer. I assume some of that will develop over time as I flesh out ideas.

Thanks for checking it out and for your feedback. I'm always pleasantly surprised how many people are willing to take time from their day to help out perfect strangers.

Toshido

Sorry the comments seem a little confusing because a confusing thing happened to me. unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I could not reproduce the result.

First thing I did on your site was click the slideshow. It took me to a black gallery page without your header on it. I tried to backtrack to your home page from the breadcrumb and it took me to another black page that looked like a homepage with keywords down the right hand side, all your galleries and too much other stuff for me to remember.

I had to reload your age to get back to the slideshow. Of course then I could not replicate my initial action.

I think your galleries look fine.

One thing I would though... How do people that want a picture from you order the picture? I mean if they do not buy online and want to buy the picture from you directly, how do they tell youwhat file they want?

I know I am looking into that now as the next step in my website. Getting organized, both locally on my had drive and in my galleries online so photos can be easily identified.
My best current though is file naming that is nice and easy to find. Only example on my webpage at the moment is in my Easter shots where the file name is "Pucks Farm (1 of 30).jpg". But then again I have a power user level account and can't sell directly so don't know if you are running into that yet.


other then the little minor things I mentioned and that one major unrepeatable issue I think your site looks very nice.