new website

[phaither]

so, here's the link to the website i just created. without being mean, please offer me some constructive criticism on how i can improve the site. it is brand-new and considered a work-in-progress.
thanks,
faith


faith bell photography

[graciousness]

It's a nice start, just nice and clean interface on quick look. I could tell you used your mac to create it - hehe (I own one, too).

In regards to the portfolio section, are you sure you want to give a download option? Unless you don't care about free use of your photos by anyone (unless your website is password protected for private viewing, etc), then I would re-consider this option and take it out. In addition, you may want to think about re-inforcing copyright and use of photos, etc somewhere on the site for extra 'protection'. All up to you.

In regards to the actual photos, are they jpegs or dng? This is something for you to be concerned about for later when you start to accumulate a lot more photos per page, as dng are huge files and can slow down page downloading if you have a lot of photos per page. Just as a note just in case....as iWeb used to convert all picture files as dng and it created problems in the long run.

Also, you will need opinions from pc users to see how your website looks on their computers. You would also want to test on other browsers such as internet explorer, firefox, etc, to see how they look. While your website will look the most dynamic on your mac and on safari, you'll find that it will look different on other browsers.

Cheers and I hope this helps!

[phaither]

thank you so much for your input. i didn't even realize there was a download option!! (it will be deleted as soon as i get home to my mac) i have a pc at work and the site looks the same here, so i'm hoping it will continue to hold up on other machines. i will look into what type of file iweb used. i actaully had quite a difficult time publishing for a while until i went back in and made the pic files a lot smaller. now it seems to be working well. i have a few shoots coming up toward the end of the month so i will be adding more soon. hopefully it won't slow anything down.

again, i really appreciate your feedback!
thanks,
f

[mshockley]

Had a quick look, agreed on the nice clean look, all your links are working, etc. Looks good, keep building the portfolio as you go.

Also agreed on download option, but as many have stated, if someone wants one of your pictures bad enough there are many ways to grab it. Even so I still have right-click and no download options on my website, it's at least a bit of a deterrent I guess. You might also want to think about slapping a watermark on your images when you use them on your website. And yeah, make them Jpegs, resized at about 600ppi on the long side at a low-res of 72 for fast loading, etc.

Viewed using Internet Explorer on PC

[BigFuzzy]

I have a question before I can further.. what is the intent of your site?
What is it you're trying to sell us? Or, if you're not selling us something, what is it you're trying to show.

I ask because commentary would be different depending if you're just displaying images for fam/friends/fun or trying to market yourself as a professional photographer (either now or in the future).

EDIT: Oh and are you only welcoming comments on the site or the images as well?

[Smallfish]

Originally Posted by graciousness

In regards to the portfolio section, are you sure you want to give a download option? Unless you don't care about free use of your photos by anyone (unless your website is password protected for private viewing, etc), then I would re-consider this option and take it out. In addition, you may want to think about re-enforcing copyright and use of photos, etc somewhere on the site for extra 'protection'. All up to you.

Agree with this as at the moment it's basically saying "go ahead download what you want". Removing this option, a statement enforcing copyright/photo use and watermarking your images are all options that'll help.

Originally Posted by BigFuzzy

I have a question before I can further.. what is the intent of your site?
What is it you're trying to sell us? Or, if you're not selling us something, what is it you're trying to show.

I ask because commentary would be different depending if you're just displaying images for fam/friends/fun or trying to market yourself as a professional photographer (either now or in the future).

That's the question I would have asked. A website for professional purposes is very different from those creating a personal site and would be critiqued differently and at a different standard. The reason i would have to ask is I don't think it's immediately clear.

If it's a personal site to share your pictures then (apart from the download bit already mentioned) I like it. It's nice, colourful and has a warm family feel to it.

Now these are just my personal views but if it's for a professional photography business then it's not quite doing it for me for these reasons:

1) There is no clear "statement" made on the main page. It says "faith bell photography" at the top then a bit about you. For all I know this is just a "blog" or personal website. I'd like to see "faith bell photography" then maybe a few of your best shots, a place to click to "enter" the site and some text describing what you do, where you're based and a copyright statement. Keep it uncluttered and simple to read. That way I know straight away what you do, an idea of the sort of photo's you can produce, whether or not you're in my area and that every photo's copyrighted. All from a simple entry page.

2) I'd pop the bit about yourself in a separate section perhaps with a good portrait shot (B&W camera in hand etc) but that's personal preference tbh.

3) Your prices. I'd want to have a "ballpark" figure so I know if I can afford you before I make contact otherwise I'll probably move on. So I'd make this readily available.

4) I love the layout and feel of the site as a family one but it does not seem "professional" enough for me if that's it's use. Best thing I can say is have a look at other professional sites and see what you can do. Some of the pro's here have excellent sites.

Anyway just my view. You'll find if you're doing this for professional reasons that the website you start with is rarely the one you end up with (this tends to be true even for the biggest companies).

[phaither]

Originally Posted by BigFuzzy

I have a question before I can further.. what is the intent of your site?
What is it you're trying to sell us? Or, if you're not selling us something, what is it you're trying to show.

I ask because commentary would be different depending if you're just displaying images for fam/friends/fun or trying to market yourself as a professional photographer (either now or in the future).

EDIT: Oh and are you only welcoming comments on the site or the images as well?

thanks for responding. i am looking to drum up some business. is my approach too light? and feel free to remark on the photos too, as long as you're polite about it i can take it

[phaither]

Originally Posted by Smallfish

Agree with this as at the moment it's basically saying "go ahead download what you want". Removing this option, a statement enforcing copyright/photo use and watermarking your images are all options that'll help.



That's the question I would have asked. A website for professional purposes is very different from those creating a personal site and would be critiqued differently and at a different standard. The reason i would have to ask is I don't think it's immediately clear.

If it's a personal site to share your pictures then (apart from the download bit already mentioned) I like it. It's nice, colourful and has a warm family feel to it.

Now these are just my personal views but if it's for a professional photography business then it's not quite doing it for me for these reasons:

1) There is no clear "statement" made on the main page. It says "faith bell photography" at the top then a bit about you. For all I know this is just a "blog" or personal website. I'd like to see "faith bell photography" then maybe a few of your best shots, a place to click to "enter" the site and some text describing what you do, where you're based and a copyright statement. Keep it uncluttered and simple to read. That way I know straight away what you do, an idea of the sort of photo's you can produce, whether or not you're in my area and that every photo's copyrighted. All from a simple entry page.

2) I'd pop the bit about yourself in a separate section perhaps with a good portrait shot (B&W camera in hand etc) but that's personal preference tbh.

3) Your prices. I'd want to have a "ballpark" figure so I know if I can afford you before I make contact otherwise I'll probably move on. So I'd make this readily available.

4) I love the layout and feel of the site as a family one but it does not seem "professional" enough for me if that's it's use. Best thing I can say is have a look at other professional sites and see what you can do. Some of the pro's here have excellent sites.

Anyway just my view. You'll find if you're doing this for professional reasons that the website you start with is rarely the one you end up with (this tends to be true even for the biggest companies).

i like the idea of having some type of intro page. i will look into setting this up. i tried to stay away from the "all black" photography pages i've seen. although nice, i wanted mine to look a little different. did i go too cutesy? as for pricing, i do have that all ready to go but most sites i've seen don't include pricing on their site. would it be enough to add a statement like "please inquire about rates..." so people will get the idea that i'm offering a service without being showy about $?

thanks again for taking the time to help me out!
f

[BuddhaPi]

Strictly from a marketing standpoint...how are you going to generate traffic / visitors to the site? If search engines are the answers heres a few pointers.

1. you'll do better with your own domain, preferrably something geographic such as plainfield-photographer.com as opposed to your business name, as that won't get searched for, and if they know the business name, they already know how to find you..

2. landing page - your homepage is the single most important page in terms of the search engines, landing pages in general will hamper your efforts. the home page need to have a good amount of content as well as text links to the other pages.. No content, google-bot will plainly leave the site and not index it. The links will give the bot a way to navigate from page to page, and each and every succeeeding page should have content on that page relating to the page itself..Rememebr google does not see the images, it only reads the text.
3. make use of meta-tags on the back-end to further assit the search engines, spiders, crawlers and bots.
4. make use of the "alt-text" tag on your images, these are good places to put search friendly phrase / keywords.
5. unrelated to marketing but a heads up on the contact page you have a visable email address, spammers just love this, they send out bots to scan pages for email addy's and harvest them, you'll be uried by spam in the near future...consider creating a "form" that users have to fill in , this will help combat spam down the road...
6. take advantage of page titles instead of using "contact.html" use contact-metuchen-photogrpaher.com... thus getting a new search term in the page title..
I see each image has it's own page, so also take advantage of these pages by adding content 2- 3 paragraphs along with the image, when writing your content be sure to use words/phrase/language that is likely to be typed in the search box.

hope this helps and hope I didn't overload you!

[phaither]

Originally Posted by BuddhaPi

Strictly from a marketing standpoint...how are you going to generate traffic / visitors to the site? If search engines are the answers heres a few pointers.

1. you'll do better with your own domain, preferrably something geographic such as plainfield-photographer.com as opposed to your business name, as that won't get searched for, and if they know the business name, they already know how to find you..

2. landing page - your homepage is the single most important page in terms of the search engines, landing pages in general will hamper your efforts. the home page need to have a good amount of content as well as text links to the other pages.. No content, google-bot will plainly leave the site and not index it. The links will give the bot a way to navigate from page to page, and each and every succeeeding page should have content on that page relating to the page itself..Rememebr google does not see the images, it only reads the text.
3. make use of meta-tags on the back-end to further assit the search engines, spiders, crawlers and bots.
4. make use of the "alt-text" tag on your images, these are good places to put search friendly phrase / keywords.
5. unrelated to marketing but a heads up on the contact page you have a visable email address, spammers just love this, they send out bots to scan pages for email addy's and harvest them, you'll be uried by spam in the near future...consider creating a "form" that users have to fill in , this will help combat spam down the road...
6. take advantage of page titles instead of using "contact.html" use contact-metuchen-photogrpaher.com... thus getting a new search term in the page title..
I see each image has it's own page, so also take advantage of these pages by adding content 2- 3 paragraphs along with the image, when writing your content be sure to use words/phrase/language that is likely to be typed in the search box.

hope this helps and hope I didn't overload you!

not overloaded but filling up with wonderful suggestions. i'm so glad i shared this here first. the email address is an alias for my personal one but i'm sure it will still get spam. how do i set up one of those forms? i'm not sure what "meta-tags" are either... love the suggestions of adding lots of search-friendly terms all over the site. makes LOTS of sense!!
f