Helen Roscoe Photography

Hi

Here are my thoughts on your site.

"Navigation" doesn't seem like the best title for the main page.

74710 bytes seems a bit large for a small black and white image.

The navigation seems a bit jumbled. The fist part has a graphic, the second has multi-level menus, and the third is plain links. "Travel..." pushes out into the center section of the page (at least in Firefox).

Additional thought and design into the top part of the page, to try and 'brand' it would be a big improvement. Things are a bit plain at the moment.

Not really keen on the teal capitals, followed by the black for the rest of the word. But maybe that's just me.

Validate!

Peter

yes all points taken on board. Theres loads need doing, just started it really. So to sumamrise,

a more consistent menu, (IE one or the other but not both)

some kind of brand image (perhaps a banner at the top)

validate (yes I know!!!! )

Ill resize that image in PS, didnt realise it would make that much difference but it does doesnt it!?

Cheers

mfdc:
I like the site - think the flash is a nice intro.

I found navigation user friendly. One small thing: you've miss-typed "photography" near the bottom of the first page. Also, when I tried to open the page to the photos in the UK, I got a "Unable to open page" response.

But...I really like the site.

Sincerely,

Jon Shannon
Sierra Nomad Photography

mfdc wrote: Could you please give me your impressions about the 'look' of this site.

Well, I got stuck on one thing: I didn't read the home page much, but instead clicked on "Biography." Imagine my surprise to be taken to "Biography, page 2." I wondered where page 1 was, even changed the URL by hand to try to get to the first page. No luck. Later, surfing back to the home page, I noticed that the home page has a biography on it. I think that's bad. I would change that somehow. Get the bio off the home page into the expected page 1 & page 2. Or, change the home page to be called "summary" or something, and the stop calling the bio page "page 2."

Other than that, I found the flash intro to be too flashy, and the content pages to be not flashy enough. They should be combined into a single look & feel, with no flash splash if done right. I think the image from the flash animation should be a logo in the left corner of each page, and that black & white-light theme should run throughout the site. It would be slick.

Best wishes for the redesign.

The "Coming Soon" page seems to be missing.

As for the Flash intro, you should have a link to skip it that's HTML, ie not part of the flash. I'm the kind of person who doesn't always mind a little fluff (flash intros, music on sites) as long as I can skip them or turn them off.

The only other nit-pick I have is the "new" button. Those are horrible. Reminds me of Geocities webpages in the late 90's. Oh, and the Bio page 2 thing, but that's already been mentioned.

The design itself is great, though! Simple, clean and easy to navigate.

I loved the intro but you should have a skip intro link
Also when you do get to the first page it feels as if something is missing, I would probably use the image from the intro somewhere on the page and continue this theme all the way through.

Nice elegant design, I like it. But on the side menu, it should be "Memories" instead of "Memorys" and it should be "Studio Sports Photos" and not "Studio Sports Photo's" (no apostrophe on plural words—only apostrophes on possessive, as in it owns something, which clearly the photos do not—they are plural, meaning, more than one photo).

I also agree that you need a skip intro link. Overall I think it's going to be a successful site, but really check on the typos and such.

The menu on the left is bad. It was confusing and while part of it kinda stood out because it extended to the black area the sub menus are in a different spot. Whole set up seems strange. The page does not really have a title. It was strange, as soon as the main page loaded I tried to scroll up instictively. It just looks like top has been cut off. After seeing the flash intro I was also expecting the main page to look like something else. Atleast have similar very contrasty things on the page. This means Lot of Black text on white. Maybe a lot of black and white photos arranged in some way. At anyrate somehow the page does not match the intro.

thanks guys im working on it....update soon

Well first of all it is so nice to see a photographers site that *isn't* horrible! I've seen a lot of them and sooooooo many photographers are so afraid of creating usable navigation.

The nav is an issue, but at least it's there! In all 6 of my browser the menu (dhtml?) is covering up the text. I'm set at 800X600. To check it I changed to 1024 X 768, and it's okay at that. You should make it work at 800X600 as a lot of users, especially we old foggies wearning bi-focals need the larger screen.

It's also cumbersome to use. Why not stick with a classic nav system that works? Plain old text links can be embellished with icons, little arrows or whatever. These types of menus like you are using are a usability nightmare.

The Flash intro...I find irrataing. It has no function, serves no purpose. To me it's just a useless wait to get to the meat.

The red and yellow 'new' image...tacky! It takes away from the classy, clean, structured look of the site.

Too much blank whitespace after the content ends, the empty scroll to the bottom is miles long. It looks like you've got tons of empty table cells which is what is causing that.

Code wise:
• No doctype - VERY IMPORTANT
• No charector encoding - VERY IMPORTANT
• Depreciated elements - margin settings in the body tag for one example

Your best bet is to control as much as you can in an external style sheet.

Your suggestions and comments (as always) have been completly helpful! I will work on the site over thee weekend and we will see what happens on Monday