Couldn't find the breadcrumb container, but I fiddled with container sizes and margins to move my navbar up beside my logo. Does this look better now?
Thank you!
Unfortunately no, something is wrong. Resizing the browser to my very large monitor still kept the navbar on the right, wrapping to 2 rows. This is what I see on a normal size window (resized smaller so that DG would accept it).
Unfortunately no, something is wrong. Resizing the browser to my very large monitor still kept the navbar on the right, wrapping to 2 rows. This is what I see on a normal size window (resized smaller so that DG would accept it).
On no! It looks fine on my 27" monitor. Everybody seems to have no trouble moving their navbar up to sit beside their logo. Mine will only let me put the navbar over or under the logo unless I resize the containers. Can anyone help?
Note: I put it back the way it was. It shows fine on my ipad now. I just hate all that wasted space between the logo, the navbar, and the main content blocks. Why can't you simply drag the navbar up beside the logo???
On no! It looks fine on my 27" monitor. Everybody seems to have no trouble moving their navbar up to sit beside their logo. Mine will only let me put the navbar over or under the logo unless I resize the containers. Can anyone help?
I suggest posting this on a separate thread as it's a problem rather than just displaying your new site.
FYI the problem exists in Chrome, FF, and IE.
On your large monitor, have you resized the browser to a smaller size to see what happens to the display?
I suggest posting this on a separate thread as it's a problem rather than just displaying your new site.
FYI the problem exists in Chrome, FF, and IE.
On your large monitor, have you resized the browser to a smaller size to see what happens to the display?
Yes, I'll do that. Thanks for taking the time, Chancy.
Thank you both for your input! I made changes: brought back the breadcrumbtrail for the automotive galleries and made the nav bar font larger. Let me know if its still hard to see the font b/c of color. I'll change it to white if needed.
No problem it was my pleasure. As far as your changes on the nav bar I think it looks fine though I wonder since you have white on the logo and social buttons that it might be better to have the nav bar white. Though thats totally a your call and what you think looks better. I find that we all have visions for our website and sometimes you have to go with your gut on what you feel looks better.
Well, I took the plunge and unveiled yesterday. www.kathleenjohnstonphotography.com. I'm trying to keep it clean and simple. I had a homepage slideshow on the old Smug, but trying this new one out with a single image. I'd love to hear your thoughts and some honest c&c.
Thanks!
No problem it was my pleasure. As far as your changes on the nav bar I think it looks fine though I wonder since you have white on the logo and social buttons that it might be better to have the nav bar white. Though thats totally a your call and what you think looks better. I find that we all have visions for our website and sometimes you have to go with your gut on what you feel looks better.
Not sure this was intended but the left navbar wraps when the browser is sized to about 8.5 x 11 inches, which is to my eye a "normal" size that one would view most often.
I like this a lot! I would change the navbar item to "client login" and that would bring them to their own folder?
Well there is a little more to it than that you have to follow the steps on the link I provided you, here it is again http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Client-login-system. But in theory yes thats what it does. It takes a little bit of coding but its just some copy and pasting. I am here to help if you need it feel free to message me privately so we don't clog up the forms. Also the gentleman that designed this feature is really nice and has helped me with some issue's I had with it. Hope this helps
Well there is a little more to it than that you have to follow the steps on the link I provided you, here it is again http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Client-login-system. But in theory yes thats what it does. It takes a little bit of coding but its just some copy and pasting. I am here to help if you need it feel free to message me privately so we don't clog up the forms. Also the gentleman that designed this feature is really nice and has helped me with some issue's I had with it. Hope this helps
Thanks, KO. Let me get the main site looking right and I'll try to tackle this.
I like your home page a lot. The background image works for me there but on your gallery pages it draws my eyes away from the photos. Have you considered using a no-photo background on all pages except for your home page?
I was also a bit surprised that once I am inside your site I have no idea whose site it is. You might consider including your banner image on all pages of your site.
You should also be aware that placing your menu on the bottom of the window means that many users won't even realize it is there. I didn't - I rarely scroll down below the gallery contents.
Unveiling the next-generation linyangchen.com, inspired by Tate Modern and La Femme Nikita.
Many of the customization tricks are from Aaron Meyers. Thanks also to SmugMug for the highly flexible underlying templates. Here's a summary:
- removed as much stuff as possible to minimise visual clutter while retaining reasonable functionality
- tried to strike the best compromise between aesthetics and legibility
- made the site hierarchy as simple as possible so that users don't have to navigate more than two or three levels
I understand that the large logo at the top is making people have to scroll down the gallery a bit, but they only have to do it once for a gallery. Hopefully it's not too annoying. :bluduh I'm sure I've overlooked things, and I haven't customized for small screens. Let me know if anything feels bad :bash
Unveiling the next-generation linyangchen.com, inspired by Tate Modern and La Femme Nikita.
Many of the customization tricks are from Aaron Meyers. Thanks also to SmugMug for the highly flexible underlying templates. Here's a summary:
- removed as much stuff as possible to minimise visual clutter while retaining reasonable functionality
- tried to strike the best compromise between aesthetics and legibility
- made the site hierarchy as simple as possible so that users don't have to navigate more than two or three levels
I understand that the large logo at the top is making people have to scroll down the gallery a bit, but they only have to do it once for a gallery. Hopefully it's not too annoying. :bluduh I'm sure I've overlooked things, and I haven't customized for small screens. Let me know if anything feels bad :bash
Lots of gasps of appreciation from me. One example: http://www.linyangchen.com/Thematic/Nature/i-gvCM5h8
However it was hard at first to get through your main page of folders, because the font is so faint, and because the overlap of the background grey scale, and the folder title grey scale, and the folder color grey, and then the fade-out of the folder thumbnail when hovering, make for a thready/foggy mixing.
Thanks very much for your valuable comments. You might have guessed that I had a lot of fun with SmugMug's new transparency toys.
Note: what appear to be folders are actually galleries, as I've got rid of the folder level entirely. I thus write 'gallery' below.
I totally agree about the readability; in fact I do find even my main navbar a little marginal in terms of readability, especially on screens whose pixels are sized at a particular ratio to the font size such that the font gets rendered even thinner than usual (I noticed this difference comparing my 13-inch MacBook and 21-inch iMac whose pixels I think are a little larger and cause the font strokes to be squeezed into a single pixel for this particularly thin font).
I'll look into increasing the gallery thumbnail title font size and perhaps making the font colour same as the links (red), and see whether the transparency still causes a problem. I'm not so keen to put the title under the box (feels cluttered) or to change the font (prefer it to the others), although I admit that doing so will improve readability...
I have also enjoyed exploring Mark's zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/. It's obviously very different from mine and in a great way - it greets me personally with your friendly family photo and the no-nonsense setup whereby I can immediately get to know you (first-person narrative at bottom) and start browsing your folders without even having to click a 'browse' button. A couple of minor suggestions which I hope are constructive:
- Home page: would it be possible to make the large picture on the right side of the window clickable to its gallery where one could read the caption? This is perhaps more applicable to portfolios like yours where there is some really interesting scientific photography. There was a very interesting photo of some alien light beam going straight up, and I was curious what it was. I know there has been controversy over tooltips, and I am not about to suggest that we somehow make tooltips appear when moused over.
- Following up from Denise's comment about the background photo, perhaps you might want to consider overlaying it with a translucent layer so as to have some background interest in your galleries without overpowering the gallery photos? But as with much of photography this is a matter of personal preference more than anything else.
- the icons at the bottom of the photos are a little small, and the current background makes them even harder to see. Perhaps make them slightly bigger but not too big?
Thanks for the thoughtful comments; I really appreciate them. I tried some non-photographic backgrounds for the gallery pages, and I totally agree that this makes a better display for showing off the photos themselves. My problem was that if I navigate there from my homepage, the non-photo backgrounds I tried all looked really dull by comparison. I know this shouldn't be a consideration - but at least for now I'm more after a fun look than a professional look. That's also the reason I left my name off the sub-pages. Most of my friends already know it's my photo site, so putting my name at the top of everything felt a bit, well, pretentious - again for a site that's just for fun. (It would of course be completely different if this were for commercial purposes.)
Finally, my reason for putting the menu at the bottom was that I wanted to minimize what's at the top, so the photos come up first. But now that I think about it, there already is a breadcrumb trail at the top. When I get a chance I'll see if I can put the menu next to it. That would make it immediately visible, as you suggest, but wouldn't push anything else further down.
I like your home page a lot. The background image works for me there but on your gallery pages it draws my eyes away from the photos. Have you considered using a no-photo background on all pages except for your home page?
I was also a bit surprised that once I am inside your site I have no idea whose site it is. You might consider including your banner image on all pages of your site.
You should also be aware that placing your menu on the bottom of the window means that many users won't even realize it is there. I didn't - I rarely scroll down below the gallery contents.
I spent today fiddling with the new format. Still not very happy with it, but as they say change is hard
So here's my new site for now http://captnemo.smugmug.com/
Any suggestions happily received, though I may not make any more changes right away, this was tiring enough for now.
John aka CaptNemo
My new site, customized
i've been working on my customizations. I just changed my background today and it really suits me.
I also added a slideshow to the homepage. Now I feel that helps draw people in a little more. I was wondering if it's possible to add music? I often times do not like music on other photographer's sites, so i'm unsure if I want to add it. There is one site that I love the music! Maybe it all depends if it's a song or type of music I like?
my site: http://www.gentzphotography.com
Do you like it?:D
Wow, that's a psychedelic opening scene you have there, with the crystal ball and the cave. :wow It tells us that we're in for some unusual stuff! Some suggestions:
- When I go into the browse or search page, the navbar fonts change - how about keeping them the same across all pages for consistency?
- How about making your 'website', 'log', 'about' and 'map' open in a new tab/window, so that your smugmug site remains open for people to browse the photos.
- Rename 'website', as it's a little confusing as to whether it refers to your smugmug site or some other site. Changing 'log' to 'blog' might also make it a little clearer.
Connie:
I love your background image, it serves as a soothing and totally appropriate canvas for the beautiful portraits that adorn your site. Suggestions:
- The slideshow title 'Portfolio' is a little too far from the slideshow images (although I understand that it is vertically aligned with the left arrow) no matter how I resize my browser window - it looks a little awkward. You may like to centre it over the slideshow or hide it altogether.
- the small Facebook icon at the bottom - you may like to make it larger or hide it since you already have a Facebook link in the navbar. If you keep the icon, perhaps make it open in a new window so visitors will not lose your smugmug site.
- how about having only the 'Portfolio' or 'Lightbox' on the home page instead of both? They seem to overlap quite a bit in terms of their purpose (i.e. to view large images in a slideshow-like environment). In addition, a difficulty I had after clicking on one of the images in the 'Lightbox' area was that I couldn't use the back button of the browser to return to the home page, and a non-SmugMug user may not immediately realise that he has to click the 'X' on the top right to get out of the light box back to the home page.
- I like it that the galleries are arranged in alphabetical order. Perhaps reverse the order so that 'A' is at the top? And as the title of the gallery is especially important in your case for clients to find their galleries using their names, you may like to make the font more readable.
Been checking out the other sites in this thread- lots of good stuff to see. The dogs had me cracking up.
-linyangchen
Thanks for checking my site out, don't know why the different fonts were still there, I had taken the green out yesterday but somehow it crept back in on the home page, so fixed that, thanks. The link 'website' is a conundrum- I had it marked home as my website is 'CaptNemos Home' but for folks only browsing pics that was confusing, have to give it more thought. The link "Log" will never be changed, it's a point of pride that I have maintained a Captains log on the internet in one form or another on the internet since long before the term blog was coined.(I wonder how many people even remember its a contraction of Web Log?) Sadly my earliest logs are no longer around but I do have entries going back to 2000, http://chilembwe.com/log/
Yes, the front page is Flashy(heh, get it flashy- background was shot with multiple flashes, well never mind) hope it catches peoples attention but I kept the photo viewing pages simple so folks can focus on the pics. I'd like a little more separation from the slide show on the home page so I'll play with the boarder css some more.
-Connie, like your site so far, please please if you do add music, don't make it play by default, nothing more annoying then someone clicking a link to a site and having music blare out in a quiet office
Wow, that's a psychedelic opening scene you have there, with the crystal ball and the cave. :wow It tells us that we're in for some unusual stuff! Some suggestions:
- When I go into the browse or search page, the navbar fonts change - how about keeping them the same across all pages for consistency?
- How about making your 'website', 'log', 'about' and 'map' open in a new tab/window, so that your smugmug site remains open for people to browse the photos.
- Rename 'website', as it's a little confusing as to whether it refers to your smugmug site or some other site. Changing 'log' to 'blog' might also make it a little clearer.
Connie:
I love your background image, it serves as a soothing and totally appropriate canvas for the beautiful portraits that adorn your site. Suggestions:
- The slideshow title 'Portfolio' is a little too far from the slideshow images (although I understand that it is vertically aligned with the left arrow) no matter how I resize my browser window - it looks a little awkward. You may like to centre it over the slideshow or hide it altogether.
- the small Facebook icon at the bottom - you may like to make it larger or hide it since you already have a Facebook link in the navbar. If you keep the icon, perhaps make it open in a new window so visitors will not lose your smugmug site.
- how about having only the 'Portfolio' or 'Lightbox' on the home page instead of both? They seem to overlap quite a bit in terms of their purpose (i.e. to view large images in a slideshow-like environment). In addition, a difficulty I had after clicking on one of the images in the 'Lightbox' area was that I couldn't use the back button of the browser to return to the home page, and a non-SmugMug user may not immediately realise that he has to click the 'X' on the top right to get out of the light box back to the home page.
- I like it that the galleries are arranged in alphabetical order. Perhaps reverse the order so that 'A' is at the top? And as the title of the gallery is especially important in your case for clients to find their galleries using their names, you may like to make the font more readable.
I also added a slideshow to the homepage. Now I feel that helps draw people in a little more.
...I was wondering if it's possible to add music? I often times do not like music on other photographer's sites, so i'm unsure if I want to add it. http://www.gentzphotography.com
Music is not supported in new smugmug.
I think you have too much going on on your homepage with three sections competing for your viewers eyes - the slideshow, the lightbox entries, and the list of galleries along the side. I don't think that will draw people in, instead I find it overwhelming.
It appears that some of your galleries are both under people and shown as individual galleries on your browse page. I also see the same galleries under people and under weddings. Was this deliberate?
And is there a reason that you have limited the number of entries across on your browse screen to three? That's probably fine on a smaller monitor but on a large monitor there is more empty space than not.
i've been working on my customizations. I just changed my background today and it really suits me.
I also added a slideshow to the homepage. Now I feel that helps draw people in a little more. I was wondering if it's possible to add music? I often times do not like music on other photographer's sites, so i'm unsure if I want to add it. There is one site that I love the music! Maybe it all depends if it's a song or type of music I like?
my site: http://www.gentzphotography.com
Do you like it?:D
Connie
I must confess I got very depressed looking at your (very nice) site. It made me realize how old and decrepit I'm getting. All those happy-looking, lean, healthy people!:cry
Seriously though, the site looks good. I like the background colours and effect - it's very soft and suits the people subjects well.People shots are not my personal thing, but yours are very capably done, and I like the overall style you have produced. You might want some detail about yourself? I agree with Denise about the homepage being busy.
Thanks for your comments. The large picture on the right side of my homepage is a standard smugmug home screen slide show. I really like your suggestion of making the slide show work so that clicking on a displayed image would take you to the associated gallery... but I don't know how to do so....
Making a background image for the gallery pages that is more subdued is an excellent idea. I'll have to look around for something suitable. My time is pretty limited, so it may take a while. But I will pursue this.
The icons below the photos are supplied by smugmug, and I agree with you that they're a bit small. Right now I don't know how to change their size, but I can probably find some code here on dgrin to do so.
The big light beam into to the sky was setup in my home town of Hobart as part of a winter arts festival. It was only operating for a couple of weeks, but it was spectacular! I only had one chance to photograph it - I would have like more...
I have also enjoyed exploring Mark's zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/. It's obviously very different from mine and in a great way - it greets me personally with your friendly family photo and the no-nonsense setup whereby I can immediately get to know you (first-person narrative at bottom) and start browsing your folders without even having to click a 'browse' button. A couple of minor suggestions which I hope are constructive:
- Home page: would it be possible to make the large picture on the right side of the window clickable to its gallery where one could read the caption? This is perhaps more applicable to portfolios like yours where there is some really interesting scientific photography. There was a very interesting photo of some alien light beam going straight up, and I was curious what it was. I know there has been controversy over tooltips, and I am not about to suggest that we somehow make tooltips appear when moused over.
- Following up from Denise's comment about the background photo, perhaps you might want to consider overlaying it with a translucent layer so as to have some background interest in your galleries without overpowering the gallery photos? But as with much of photography this is a matter of personal preference more than anything else.
- the icons at the bottom of the photos are a little small, and the current background makes them even harder to see. Perhaps make them slightly bigger but not too big?
John: good point, keep 'log'. Or even 'Captain's log' but it probably takes up too much space.
Connie: no music, unless it's Mahler's Symphony No. 8 which I won't mind accidentally and automatically blasting into my office at full volume
Mark: thanks for the photo description. Hobart and Alaska - two amazing places at opposite ends of the earth! I have to apologise that I do not actually know how to implement my suggestions about the slideshow and icon size You might be able to find something related on Aaron Meyers' compilation of customizations and modify it, or hopefully someone else on this thread could point us in the right direction. And one more thing you might want to investigate - in your galleries, the corners of the large pictures to the left of the thumbnails stick out of the frame's rounded corners (but the thumbnails themselves seem fine).
Legacy Look +
The "Get the Legacy Look" blog was very helpful in my transition. Scott was kind enough to provide some code to adjust the opacity/color of the file names. Now, I'd like to get some code so that the file folder icons match the opacity/color of the file names. www.branchimages.net
Comments
Unfortunately no, something is wrong. Resizing the browser to my very large monitor still kept the navbar on the right, wrapping to 2 rows. This is what I see on a normal size window (resized smaller so that DG would accept it).
On no! It looks fine on my 27" monitor. Everybody seems to have no trouble moving their navbar up to sit beside their logo. Mine will only let me put the navbar over or under the logo unless I resize the containers. Can anyone help?
Note: I put it back the way it was. It shows fine on my ipad now. I just hate all that wasted space between the logo, the navbar, and the main content blocks. Why can't you simply drag the navbar up beside the logo???
www.kathleenjohnstonphotography.com
I suggest posting this on a separate thread as it's a problem rather than just displaying your new site.
FYI the problem exists in Chrome, FF, and IE.
On your large monitor, have you resized the browser to a smaller size to see what happens to the display?
Yes, I'll do that. Thanks for taking the time, Chancy.
www.kathleenjohnstonphotography.com
No problem it was my pleasure. As far as your changes on the nav bar I think it looks fine though I wonder since you have white on the logo and social buttons that it might be better to have the nav bar white. Though thats totally a your call and what you think looks better. I find that we all have visions for our website and sometimes you have to go with your gut on what you feel looks better.
http://www.k-ophotography.com/
I think you would benefit a lot using a client login for your client section. With the old smugmug you could do it using java but with this new one its not possible unless you use this gentlemen's customization http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Client-login-system. If you want to see what it looks like in action feel free to check out my site http://www.k-ophotography.com/Client-Login- then type in Robert Rue Car Show.
http://www.k-ophotography.com/
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Not sure this was intended but the left navbar wraps when the browser is sized to about 8.5 x 11 inches, which is to my eye a "normal" size that one would view most often.
I like this a lot! I would change the navbar item to "client login" and that would bring them to their own folder?
www.kathleenjohnstonphotography.com
Well there is a little more to it than that you have to follow the steps on the link I provided you, here it is again http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Customisations/Client-login-system. But in theory yes thats what it does. It takes a little bit of coding but its just some copy and pasting. I am here to help if you need it feel free to message me privately so we don't clog up the forms. Also the gentleman that designed this feature is really nice and has helped me with some issue's I had with it. Hope this helps
http://www.k-ophotography.com/
Thanks, KO. Let me get the main site looking right and I'll try to tackle this.
www.kathleenjohnstonphotography.com
Here's my site:
http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/
It's just for fun, nothing commercial. I'm mostly happy with it, apart from wanting to improve the smugmug gallery style a little.
- Mark
I like the homepage set up very much!!!
Thanks...I'll probably keep tweaking, but for now I'm really happy with how much better my New Smugmug site looks compared to the old version!
I was also a bit surprised that once I am inside your site I have no idea whose site it is. You might consider including your banner image on all pages of your site.
You should also be aware that placing your menu on the bottom of the window means that many users won't even realize it is there. I didn't - I rarely scroll down below the gallery contents.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Many of the customization tricks are from
- removed as much stuff as possible to minimise visual clutter while retaining reasonable functionality
- tried to strike the best compromise between aesthetics and legibility
- made the site hierarchy as simple as possible so that users don't have to navigate more than two or three levels
I understand that the large logo at the top is making people have to scroll down the gallery a bit, but they only have to do it once for a gallery. Hopefully it's not too annoying. :bluduh I'm sure I've overlooked things, and I haven't customized for small screens. Let me know if anything feels bad :bash
www.linyangchen.com
Lots of gasps of appreciation from me. One example: http://www.linyangchen.com/Thematic/Nature/i-gvCM5h8
However it was hard at first to get through your main page of folders, because the font is so faint, and because the overlap of the background grey scale, and the folder title grey scale, and the folder color grey, and then the fade-out of the folder thumbnail when hovering, make for a thready/foggy mixing.
You might consider changing the font color, size, or boldness?
Some ideas:
http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations/Other
Or put the folder title below the thumbnail?
Note: what appear to be folders are actually galleries, as I've got rid of the folder level entirely. I thus write 'gallery' below.
I totally agree about the readability; in fact I do find even my main navbar a little marginal in terms of readability, especially on screens whose pixels are sized at a particular ratio to the font size such that the font gets rendered even thinner than usual (I noticed this difference comparing my 13-inch MacBook and 21-inch iMac whose pixels I think are a little larger and cause the font strokes to be squeezed into a single pixel for this particularly thin font).
I'll look into increasing the gallery thumbnail title font size and perhaps making the font colour same as the links (red), and see whether the transparency still causes a problem. I'm not so keen to put the title under the box (feels cluttered) or to change the font (prefer it to the others), although I admit that doing so will improve readability...
Yangchen
www.linyangchen.com
- Home page: would it be possible to make the large picture on the right side of the window clickable to its gallery where one could read the caption? This is perhaps more applicable to portfolios like yours where there is some really interesting scientific photography. There was a very interesting photo of some alien light beam going straight up, and I was curious what it was.
- Following up from Denise's comment about the background photo, perhaps you might want to consider overlaying it with a translucent layer so as to have some background interest in your galleries without overpowering the gallery photos? But as with much of photography this is a matter of personal preference more than anything else.
- the icons at the bottom of the photos are a little small, and the current background makes them even harder to see. Perhaps make them slightly bigger but not too big?
Happy customisation. :ivar
Yangchen
www.linyangchen.com
Thanks for the thoughtful comments; I really appreciate them. I tried some non-photographic backgrounds for the gallery pages, and I totally agree that this makes a better display for showing off the photos themselves. My problem was that if I navigate there from my homepage, the non-photo backgrounds I tried all looked really dull by comparison. I know this shouldn't be a consideration - but at least for now I'm more after a fun look than a professional look. That's also the reason I left my name off the sub-pages. Most of my friends already know it's my photo site, so putting my name at the top of everything felt a bit, well, pretentious - again for a site that's just for fun. (It would of course be completely different if this were for commercial purposes.)
Finally, my reason for putting the menu at the bottom was that I wanted to minimize what's at the top, so the photos come up first. But now that I think about it, there already is a breadcrumb trail at the top. When I get a chance I'll see if I can put the menu next to it. That would make it immediately visible, as you suggest, but wouldn't push anything else further down.
Thanks again for the suggestions.
- Mark
So here's my new site for now http://captnemo.smugmug.com/
Any suggestions happily received, though I may not make any more changes right away, this was tiring enough for now.
John aka CaptNemo
i've been working on my customizations. I just changed my background today and it really suits me.
I also added a slideshow to the homepage. Now I feel that helps draw people in a little more. I was wondering if it's possible to add music? I often times do not like music on other photographer's sites, so i'm unsure if I want to add it. There is one site that I love the music! Maybe it all depends if it's a song or type of music I like?
my site:
http://www.gentzphotography.com
Do you like it?:D
Facebook: www.facebook.com/GentzPhotography
Wow, that's a psychedelic opening scene you have there, with the crystal ball and the cave. :wow It tells us that we're in for some unusual stuff! Some suggestions:
- When I go into the browse or search page, the navbar fonts change - how about keeping them the same across all pages for consistency?
- How about making your 'website', 'log', 'about' and 'map' open in a new tab/window, so that your smugmug site remains open for people to browse the photos.
- Rename 'website', as it's a little confusing as to whether it refers to your smugmug site or some other site. Changing 'log' to 'blog' might also make it a little clearer.
Connie:
I love your background image, it serves as a soothing and totally appropriate canvas for the beautiful portraits that adorn your site.
- The slideshow title 'Portfolio' is a little too far from the slideshow images (although I understand that it is vertically aligned with the left arrow) no matter how I resize my browser window - it looks a little awkward. You may like to centre it over the slideshow or hide it altogether.
- the small Facebook icon at the bottom - you may like to make it larger or hide it since you already have a Facebook link in the navbar. If you keep the icon, perhaps make it open in a new window so visitors will not lose your smugmug site.
- how about having only the 'Portfolio' or 'Lightbox' on the home page instead of both? They seem to overlap quite a bit in terms of their purpose (i.e. to view large images in a slideshow-like environment). In addition, a difficulty I had after clicking on one of the images in the 'Lightbox' area was that I couldn't use the back button of the browser to return to the home page, and a non-SmugMug user may not immediately realise that he has to click the 'X' on the top right to get out of the light box back to the home page.
- I like it that the galleries are arranged in alphabetical order. Perhaps reverse the order so that 'A' is at the top? And as the title of the gallery is especially important in your case for clients to find their galleries using their names, you may like to make the font more readable.
Have fun!
www.linyangchen.com
-linyangchen
Thanks for checking my site out, don't know why the different fonts were still there, I had taken the green out yesterday but somehow it crept back in on the home page, so fixed that, thanks. The link 'website' is a conundrum- I had it marked home as my website is 'CaptNemos Home' but for folks only browsing pics that was confusing, have to give it more thought. The link "Log" will never be changed, it's a point of pride that I have maintained a Captains log on the internet in one form or another on the internet since long before the term blog was coined.(I wonder how many people even remember its a contraction of Web Log?) Sadly my earliest logs are no longer around but I do have entries going back to 2000, http://chilembwe.com/log/
Yes, the front page is Flashy(heh, get it flashy- background was shot with multiple flashes, well never mind) hope it catches peoples attention but I kept the photo viewing pages simple so folks can focus on the pics. I'd like a little more separation from the slide show on the home page so I'll play with the boarder css some more.
-Connie, like your site so far, please please if you do add music, don't make it play by default, nothing more annoying then someone clicking a link to a site and having music blare out in a quiet office
I think you have too much going on on your homepage with three sections competing for your viewers eyes - the slideshow, the lightbox entries, and the list of galleries along the side. I don't think that will draw people in, instead I find it overwhelming.
It appears that some of your galleries are both under people and shown as individual galleries on your browse page. I also see the same galleries under people and under weddings. Was this deliberate?
And is there a reason that you have limited the number of entries across on your browse screen to three? That's probably fine on a smaller monitor but on a large monitor there is more empty space than not.
--- Denise
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
Connie
I must confess I got very depressed looking at your (very nice) site. It made me realize how old and decrepit I'm getting. All those happy-looking, lean, healthy people!:cry
Seriously though, the site looks good. I like the background colours and effect - it's very soft and suits the people subjects well.People shots are not my personal thing, but yours are very capably done, and I like the overall style you have produced. You might want some detail about yourself? I agree with Denise about the homepage being busy.
Perhaps I need to join a gym?
Thanks for your comments. The large picture on the right side of my homepage is a standard smugmug home screen slide show. I really like your suggestion of making the slide show work so that clicking on a displayed image would take you to the associated gallery... but I don't know how to do so....
Making a background image for the gallery pages that is more subdued is an excellent idea. I'll have to look around for something suitable. My time is pretty limited, so it may take a while. But I will pursue this.
The icons below the photos are supplied by smugmug, and I agree with you that they're a bit small. Right now I don't know how to change their size, but I can probably find some code here on dgrin to do so.
The big light beam into to the sky was setup in my home town of Hobart as part of a winter arts festival. It was only operating for a couple of weeks, but it was spectacular! I only had one chance to photograph it - I would have like more...
- Mark
Connie: no music, unless it's Mahler's Symphony No. 8 which I won't mind accidentally and automatically blasting into my office at full volume
Mark: thanks for the photo description. Hobart and Alaska - two amazing places at opposite ends of the earth! I have to apologise that I do not actually know how to implement my suggestions about the slideshow and icon size
Yangchen
www.linyangchen.com
The "Get the Legacy Look" blog was very helpful in my transition. Scott was kind enough to provide some code to adjust the opacity/color of the file names. Now, I'd like to get some code so that the file folder icons match the opacity/color of the file names.
www.branchimages.net