Website Help Needed....

gmonkeh

Hey guys, I have a big job coming up on the 18th it's a church directory gig and I'll be shooting around 200+ individuals/families for 4 consecutive sundays.

I decided since I've been getting a few paying gigs lately to go ahead and design a website.

http://www.reverbphotography.com

I started putting it together last night and this is what I have so far. Now what I need to know is what browser and resolution you are viewing the website in and if the site looks good in that browser/resolution.

ie. 1024x768 Firefox - site looks good.
800x600 Explorer - some parts are overlapping each other

Oh and any comments/critiques regarding the design elements would be appreciated as well. I hope you guys can help me out.

Thanks in advance.

Alex

saurora

I viewed your website with Firefox at 1280x768 and it looks good to me. I enjoyed your engagement portraits and your corporate shots. Are these people you work with? If not, you sure did a good job making them look relaxed! I could see some of the links at the bottom right of the page are not yet operational, but I imagine you're still working on it if you just started last night! Good luck with your business and site.

Rhuarc

My opinion may be in the minority here, but I would not worry about 800x600 resolutions. There is a VERY small percentage of people who still use this resolution, and most of the time the people are will not be the type to go to a photography site to look at picture. I would worry about everything 1024px wide and up. In my experience it makes designing a website much simpler and more pleasing to the eye when you can make it that wide, versus the extremly narrow 800.

But that's just my .02!

gmonkeh

Thx saurora and Rhuarc,

Rhuarc - that's the thing about designing website's that gets frustrating sometimes. Unless you have a 100% fluid layout you just have no control on what the site looks like in other monitors/browsers. I just want to cover my bases and see if the site looks presentable in different resolutions.

I see you're from Everett, I just moved to Bremerton a couple of months ago.

Saurora - The guy in the couple shots is one of my best friends. He was my best man at my wedding this last December. The corporate shots where from a local Mortgage company, they just heard about me through word of mouth and asked me to come in and do their headshots. I guess I'm just one of those people who makes you feel at ease Which means in other words I can't be trusted cause I'll steal your babies. j/k

Rhuarc

Have you done much shooting around the area yet? Next Saturday (17th) Andrew (greenpea) and are probably going to get together over at the locks in Seattle to do some shooting. I think he said something about herons. I could be mistaken however, lol. Any chance you'd be able to make it over? I don't remember how far West of Seattle Bremerton is.

About the site. The other problem with designing websites is you have two standards to comply with. You either stick with W3C standards, or stuff that displays properly in IE. Unfortunatley there are some html tags that just don't show up properly in IE. And one of those just happens to be a tag related to fluid widths!! It's pretty easy IIRC to do very fluid layouts if you conform to only W3C, but if you are sticking to IE stuff that's a whole other story!!

What program are you using to code the site, or are you just doing straight HTML?

Mike Lane

Looks good in firefox 2.0.0.1 for mac 1600x1006. One thing though, I noticed that your logo image is a bit pixelated at this size. There are 2 reasons for that I think. First off you're stretching an image that ia fairly small to begin with. Also you need some anti-alias love on the text to keep it from pixelating at larger sizes.

FocusingOnFlorida

The first thing I look for when opening a website is if it is pleasing to the eye. Yours passes there. I have a wide screen laptop @ 1440 X 900. The problem came when I turned off my favorites and the sun streched to an oval. I would not recomend having graphics of any kind conform to the browser resolution. Here is a print screen with more info to follow.



The first feeling I got was that you were a landscape photographer. Not sure if the landscape in the banner says portrait / wedding / commercial photographer. I then saw the photo of the girl and wondered if that was you. I had to read it to understand what the photo represented. The customer is not going to be concerned with what / how/ and why. I would use that as a change to get keywords into the page. I then looked for the title. Shades of Grey? I would use this area to include the area your plan to service and well as the keywords PHOTOGRAPHY and PHOTOGRAPHER. You want people to be able to find you through the search engines. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Next I read the page. It looks like you are on the right track, but there is no text explaining where your business is primarily located. You should get some text in the page that people will be searching for. Unless you plan on marketing Reverb Photography hard in your area so that your prospective clients will be searching on that phrase. <o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
Next, I looked at your code. The good thing was that I did see a few Meta Tags. The bad thing was that they contain no information. There are also more Meta Tags that will help you out. The Description Tag is going to be you most important Meta Tag as this information will be displayed under your TITLE when people find you site via search engines. <o:p></o:p>
<o:p></o:p>
I hope this helps a little.<o:p></o:p>

gmonkeh wrote:

Hey guys, I have a big job coming up on the 18th it's a church directory gig and I'll be shooting around 200+ individuals/families for 4 consecutive sundays.

I decided since I've been getting a few paying gigs lately to go ahead and design a website.

http://www.reverbphotography.com

I started putting it together last night and this is what I have so far. Now what I need to know is what browser and resolution you are viewing the website in and if the site looks good in that browser/resolution.

ie. 1024x768 Firefox - site looks good.
800x600 Explorer - some parts are overlapping each other

Oh and any comments/critiques regarding the design elements would be appreciated as well. I hope you guys can help me out.

Thanks in advance.

Alex

FocusingOnFlorida

I definetly disagree with this. I look at my website stats and there are many many that are still using 800 x 600 resolution. I am a web developer at our local school district and many there are still using 800x600. (I wish everyone would go to a higher resolution but they aren't there yet. Many say they cannot see if they are at a higher resolution. They are not familiar enough with their machine to know that they can make the text larger and still have the benefit of a higher resolution screen. I even found one girl last year that was using 640x480. I wouldn't have know if my wife didn't call me. I thought she had her magnifier on when I first go there. It's been a long time since I had seen that. She had just been putting up with that for years and didn't know how to change the resolution.

I disagree that someone with a resolution of 800 x 600 would not be going to a website to look at a picture. You never know what your client screen resolution will be. Myself, I would prefer that both my clients and prospective clients see my web page. Not to mention parent, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncle of the bride and groom in the case of a wedding.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Rhuarc wrote:

My opinion may be in the minority here, but I would not worry about 800x600 resolutions. There is a VERY small percentage of people who still use this resolution, and most of the time the people are will not be the type to go to a photography site to look at picture. I would worry about everything 1024px wide and up. In my experience it makes designing a website much simpler and more pleasing to the eye when you can make it that wide, versus the extremly narrow 800.

But that's just my .02!

LuckyBob

I do quite a bit of web development also, and I agree that you can't cut out the 800x600 users. For that matter, you have to take into account users with Palm/PocketPC devices, WAP phones, etc. My personal philosophy: 100% fluid layouts with everything specified in percentages and EMs, with basic navigation and content containers before anything else in code flow for those users who don't have (proper) CSS support.

As far as your logo goes, if you were to split it up into several different images with variable width black spacers, you could avoid the awkward scaling issues with different resolutions.

Rhuarc

LuckyBob wrote:

I do quite a bit of web development also, and I agree that you can't cut out the 800x600 users. For that matter, you have to take into account users with Palm/PocketPC devices, WAP phones, etc. My personal philosophy: 100% fluid layouts with everything specified in percentages and EMs, with basic navigation and content containers before anything else in code flow for those users who don't have (proper) CSS support.

As far as your logo goes, if you were to split it up into several different images with variable width black spacers, you could avoid the awkward scaling issues with different resolutions.

I hadn't even thought about these users. What about low-bandwidth, are you have an option for lower quality jpegs or will they already be low enough quality to not bog down a dialup user?

gmonkeh

Actually I was able to fix the logo by using a trick, I used a gradient on my logo to match the background and applied the image left hand. So when a higher resolution monitor views it it will be seamless from left to right.

Now for anyone with less than 1024x768 resolution it will just have to do

wxwax

1280x800
Opera
Safari
Firefox

Looks swell.

FocusingOnFlorida

Wow Alex,

What a difference just getting rid of the sunrise or sunset. This looks very professional "to me" now. I will try to look at it again later in more detail.

wxwax wrote:

1280x800
Opera
Safari
Firefox

Looks swell.

Rhuarc

FocusingOnFlorida wrote:

Wow Alex,

What a difference just getting rid of the sunrise or sunset. This looks very professional "to me" now. I will try to look at it again later in more detail.

I agree, I took a look at the site and am very impressed. Very professional looking. If you don't mind me asking what software did you use for the overall site production, and then for the flash galleries?

LuckyBob

Rhuarc wrote:

I hadn't even thought about these users. What about low-bandwidth, are you have an option for lower quality jpegs or will they already be low enough quality to not bog down a dialup user?

Depends on the sizes of the files. I usually try to keep the total page size for the navigation and content to ~50KB. I figgure 10 seconds or so on dialup or 20 seconds on a slow cell network is acceptable. I tend to be big on GIF images when it's something really simple - like the "Reverb" in gmonkeh's top logo. If there's only a few colors in a small, simple image, cutting JPEG's size down to GIF sizes tends to result in color shifts and macroblocking. gmonkeh did a good job - the top logo's only 12.2KB, and the bulk of the site adds up to 22.2KB.

LuckyBob

Rhuarc wrote:

I agree, I took a look at the site and am very impressed. Very professional looking. If you don't mind me asking what software did you use for the overall site production, and then for the flash galleries?

I won't spoil his fun, but if you're really curious, the copyrights are in the source code

gmonkeh

The CSS file isn't of my doing but everything else is pretty much on my part. I use Adobe GoLive for my layout usually switching from graphical to HTML to tweak some things.

The slideshow is a Flash component called Slideshow Pro. It's actualy a really great plugin for flash, easily customizeable and it works with RSS feeds, which is how im using it. It's connected to my flickr.com accounts. So anything I have on flickr shows up in the slideshow.

Thanks to everyone who's responded, I took everyone's advice into consideration and really did find it helpful. I'm waiting a week to go live on the site. I've been told my pricing is way too cheap especially on the print packages and such. I'm looking around at other local photographers and I can't decide what to charge.

Anyone have any experience with this?