Opinions on my photography site

[JerBear]

Transitions are to stark, better to have a flow. Colors are to contrasting, better to have warm, welcoming flow. navigation needs to be easy with NO "Back" action. Think about a better store option

JM

[Ozscot]

My apologies if I'm sounding too harsh or too critical in relation to this site - but there's a few things which simply aren't sitting squarely and they genuinely concern me - the SSL issue for one (which you have now rectified) - No Meta data or Tags that would ensure folks searching for him found him, if you Google his actual name there's only one entry and yet his site has been up and running since 2002 - The fact we're talking about a photographer who has images of the most powerful people on the planet on his pages which are then interspersed with some bizarre others - a very poor quality image of a sunday kick around soccer match follows on after someone like President Bush? Just what 'market' is that reaching out for? I'm presuming the web site is there to bring in business - but when you have access to the President of the United States and other powerful leaders who is your advertising aimed at? The world's political leaders? Do they really surf the web looking for a photographer for their sunday kick around?

There's two lines of text which seem odd too - it says on the front page that the Washingtonian Magazine stated Peter Cutts was ‘One of the ten most recommended photographers’ – and yet in the biography it says "Washingtonian Magazine listed Peter Cutts Photography as one of the ten most recommended photographers in Washington DC" - There's a distinct difference between an individual and a corporation or Franchise - which one is it? If folks call to pay for a photographic session - do they get Peter Cutts to take the pictures or do they get a staffer?

I'm sorry - I hope you can see why those things in combination would get my spidey sense tingling - a site that asks folks for money but where there's no security, where a man who photographs the President regularly and had personal access to Nixon, Clinton, Powell et al but allows some really poor unrelated images to appear on his site, where there's no search engine optimisation, where the e-mail contact is a freebie that anyone can muster in two seconds flat, where you ask 'how does it look now that I've worked on it' - and yet it has essentially remained the same for the last four years...those are the factors which would concern me about the site before we even reach the technicalities of the software being used....

Again - I really do apologise if that sounds harsh and you're trying to do the best you can in a difficult client relationship...but you did ask what I thought so I've said out loud what I'm thinking...

Oz

[Nathan deGargoyle]

Hi Ray,

Please don't take this the wrong way but I think you've set yourself up to be shot down. Your OP gives the impression that you are a full time, professional web-designer but your site says "I am an Eagle Scout attending Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA".

As a fully professional job this leaves a lot to be desired, as noted above. As a student trying to make a little dosh on the side it's a little more forgiveable.

But please, if you are trying to give a pro appearance, take out the reference to being a Scout, and please, please, please! fix all the spelling mistakes.

[morts]

As an IT nerd, let me elucidate on the wonders of SSL/HTTPS

When you access a website like DPS, the browser opens an HTTP stream (connection) to the server and sends a request that basically says: "Send me file.htm" along with some other data like how long to keep the connection open for other work and what browser you are using etc etc.

 
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.com

The server then sends the page or file you requested over said connection along with some other data like the date/time, what the server version is and so forth in plain text.

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 22:38:34 GMT
 Server: Apache/1.3.3.7 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux)
 Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMT
 Etag: "3f80f-1b6-3e1cb03b"
 Accept-Ranges: bytes
 Content-Length: 438
 Connection: close
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

That is literally what is sent over the net. The page itself follows after that.

Whether you have an SSL cert or no, when you open an HTTP connection ALL data is sent as plain text. Plain text means that if I send a password like "lolilikebums123" as part of a login form, it'll send "lolilikebums123" over the network and anyone that intercepts the data can read your password or credit card details if that's what you're sending!

When you open a https connection, the browser and server negotiate and agree upon an encryption standard and generate a set of public/private keys to encrypt ALL traffic going over that connection using the encryption method agreed upon.

The upshot of this that if anyone intercepts your traffic while it's going over the network to the website's server, they can see it, but cannot read it as they need the encryption keys held by the server and browser. The CIA could probably crack it, given time, but nobody else can.

The exception is when you are logging in using ********** or a PHP script then a good programmer will encrypt the password you enter (usually with MD5) before sending it over the internet.

 MD5("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.") 
  = e4d909c290d0fb1ca068ffaddf22cbd0

This way, if anyone intercepts this, it'll be useless to them essentially!

Hope this clears things up a little!

[Chronicdiving]

Form is now secure in case anyone was curious :-D

Thank you for your help! That was potentially a very dangerous issue

[tulsidas]

im sorry to say that i dont like it. i dont like the font, i dont like a lot about it really.
sorry cause im sure you worked hard for it.
why dont you check out blu domain to see some more modern examples.
the current one looks really old.