My new website and blog.

[Ubergeek]

Not sure if this is the correct section or not.

I am currently in the progress of writing my website from scratch (I am a software engineer during the day) with the eventual goal of displaying my work and selling the odd print if anyone wanted them. I have set up a blog as well which would be good if people signed up to (its lonely talking to yourself lol)

Any suggestions would be great I know some of the links don’t work yet but you get the main jist of how it should look.

Tim Naylors Online Photo & Art Porfolio

Regards.

[OsmosisStudios]

A few things from a functionality point of view: Dont have your site open up to a gallery and dont separate your galleries out the way you have. They should be contained in a main gallery page.

From a design point of view, it's not bad. A good start, at least.
Your main div is overlapping your sidebar div, so some of your text (the "y" in "photography" and some of the separation dots) are overlapping. As is your image at the top and your copyright message at the bottom. I'd move the latter to the bottom of the main div section, on one or two lines.

Once youve got the other pages filled, it should work. Just fix those things.

[Ubergeek]

Thanks for the tips, what browser are you using as it displays fine in both IE and Firefox for myself I can honestly say hand on heart I hate html, css lol I am a programmer not a designer and trying to get my head round this stuff is driving me crazy I am a C++ programmer by trade.

[funcrunch]

I just tried to view your site in Chromium (same codebase as Chrome, Google's browser), and it came up with a completely blank page, other than the background image/colors. You might want to run your site through Browsershots to check compatibility.

I'm a former programmer myself and I hate design and CSS too, so I feel your pain. My site is in Drupal (which I wouldn't wish on any non-programmer) and I'm currently installing a new third-party theme, after having given up on doing my own design and deciding to use someone else's.

[Izzy]

Fire Fox 3.6.11 and Windows 7

Site appears as 2 large squares, one gradient black and the other gradient red. The gallery shows up at the very bottom (last 1 1/2 inches) with the first row chopped off. Mouse over for pictures work as well as the pop up for the gallery view.

Seeing that the 2 squares mentioned dominate 100% of the landing screen it would appear that you have landed on an incomplete or malfunctioning web site.

[OsmosisStudios]

I was using it on Safari on a macbook Pro. If youre using padding, IE tends to fuxor that up pretty bad.

[Photologyst]

I viewed with MB Pro in Safari and Chrome. Saw two blank dark rectangles with 3 photos beneath them.

In Fire Fox there is a blank white page with 8 photos, the top 5 of which are cut in half.

Why are you writing from scratch when there are so many templates available?

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by Photologyst

I viewed with MB Pro in Safari and Chrome. Saw two blank dark rectangles with 3 photos beneath them.

In Fire Fox there is a blank white page with 8 photos, the top 5 of which are cut in half.

Why are you writing from scratch when there are so many templates available?

Templates are booooring.

[Ubergeek]

Ah think I have it sorted now, if you could try it again. The reason I wrote the thing from scratch is I wanted more control of how my images would be displayed and also stored on the server, once i have a basic site up and running making enhancements should be fairly easily this isnt always as easy when using a template.

Thank you everyone for your help

[Photologyst]

Tim, I can see the site clearly now. However, your bio, prices, contact or TOU do not load. Pages are blank.

My suggestions would be to have a thumbnail space and then a large photo. It’s annoying IMHO to have to click on every single photo and then go back again. Many of the photos appear quite dark, even when I have my screen fully backlit?

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Templates are booooring.

Uhu, so are many photo sites, not to mention difficult to navigate.

One can always modify/customize templates. Lightroom has some great HTML and Flash templates that one can simply FTP.

I used to do everything from scratch. Now, I only do that in the kitchen.