New Gallery

Well its obvious that it looks like a link, leave at that... Its cool to! with the fade and everything... for the in-body links, Maybe add a curly script design division line with the top Banners so that it focuses the eyes to the links.... or put little button thingies to grab attention...

Beautiful website. I think that there definitely needs to be a division between the page's title and the menu.

I would try to find a more interesting way to display the gallery. In your case noting the use of such high end graphics you might check out something in flash, for the gallery (or even the whole site). If you don't change it I would get a subtle arrow, triangle, or something on the lower resolution gallery to indicate progression or recession through the gallery. Like I said before, I think you have a killer design so whatever you do don't lose the overall feel.

You are missing a title for the site ... by title I mean Title not that your pages are missing a graphic.

Something that I try to do on any commercial type site is put an email and phone number on every page. You may or may not want to do this since it could possibly take away from the very clean layout you already have, but you might give it some thought.

I also noticed that you rotate a couple different shades of blue, one for the logo, one gradient for the menu, another for some of the text on your pages. I would pick either two that sort of complement each other or one single color. I really don't think that color of the logo works well with what you got (the light blue fill).

An all image website is never a good idea. You really should think about getting some actual text content in there.

Why?

1) Search engines will never be able to find and index this site

2) What if images fail to load? How would one read anything about contacting you?

Hi all and thanks for your feedback!

r3, when you wrote "In your case noting the use of such high end graphics you might check out something in flash", why do you consider flash to be of any use? I can't see any, plus the effect of a whooping 2mb flash-monster to display the hi-res gallery? Plus plus I got no clue about flash

roo, you are right about the all-image site, but programming it with text is one hell of a thing for a non-programmer like me, besides I couldn't use the font... The question what happens if photos fail to load does not scare me, what is somebody with a text-browser doing on a photo-retouchers site? But true about the title-tags, I guess they are missing on some pages...

Patrick

Well someone using a text reader doesn't mean he/she is blind.

Could be very bad eyesight from diabetes...could be neurological problems such as Parkinson's, MS, or a host of other health issues that make mouse and keyboard very difficult to use.......

For example a person with Parkinson's can see just fine however the tremors could make using mouse or keyboard impossible...hence a text reader..

That's very reasonable, but how big is the chance of such a physically challenged person browsing my website as a future customer?

Well about the flash thing. I was only thinking in a "design" sense and not for the purpose of functionality. With flash you can just have interesting transitions, quicker mouse re-actions, and just more freedom graphic-wise. So the purpose would just be to another cool feature ... nothing more. I have just seen some very interesting galleries and I think that is a major selling point of your site so it better look good. The overhead is very high so understandable if you go the other direction.

I don't completely agree with Roo. I think that as long as you add alt tags to describe the images you are using then you should be fine with a text only broswer since your purpose of the site is to display pictures and not text. As long as a text only broswer can initally get a summary of what it is you do then I would think that would be suffient since they are pretty much screwed anyway since they can't view any pictures.

My point is just that when you are offering a service you should make a site as accessable as you can.

Codewise...things that can cause cross browser/cross OS display problems:
• No Doctype
• No character encoding meta tag

These things can confuse browsers, as they don't know what kind of code they are supposed to reading/serving up.

Things that can cause display problems:
• Some of the images have no height and width set.
• Some of the images have width set, but no height

Missing tags...i.e. on one page there is center tag, but no closing center tag. (For the record center tags are depreciated)

Missing # in front of color hex codes in some places

Tags that aren't allowed.....exapmle...you have a scrolling="no" in an image tag.

Theses things WILL cause display problems....

Also..there is no point in having that inline CSS in the page when there is no text content....it's just adding weight
needlessly.

The validator is your friend

Graphic site = dialup users worst nightmare.

ALWAYS use width and height tags on ALL images, I know the w3c don't recommend it but they should. A graphic intense site is very bad to watch loading as it jumps all over the place and looks very cheap and nasty until loaded. If you have text it is even worse as the text jumps around and you end up playing tag trying to find it or where you were up to.

Slight horziontal scroll at 800x600

Your links are the same colour as your logo/banner, then on other pages your links are black which is the same as the text, can get confusing.

Overall pretty good, agreed you need text on there though

NOt bad, but I would lose the background - made me feel all funny, looking at it for more than a few seconds.

I think you retouching work looks great - something I'm terrible at, so kudos on that.

That being said, design wise it's very dated -

In a nutshell, lose the javascript, lose the tables, learn CSS.

In my humble opinion (and people, is it really necessary to use acronyms - are we really incapable of consrtucting proper sentences - this is not aimed at anyone, more a general moan... IMHO, my arse!) it doesn't look as if a professional made it, therefore it looks amateurish, which is a shame as you're clearly talented in your field.

I would choose a more neutral background, create a distinction between the nav and content - maybe just with a monochromatic colour scheme, or different colours ro denote different areas

This is the first site I learned from.

http://www.createwebmagic.com/css101/

I don't think the site is a great showcase for your undoubted photoshop skills

There needs to be seperation of content and navigation, rather than everything bleeding into each other, and the background is too jarring for my eyes, and the font is a bad choice...

In summary - poor website, great photos!

I very quickly mocked up what I would do to improve the site - different areas and colors for each section, and each section clearly seperated, and I would add a lot more content. I threw this together to give you an idea of what I was thinking - a pictureis wort a 1000 words after all, but feel free to tear it apart if you want to!

Now everyone can tell me how bad my idea is!

here it is

Cool chris; but hey pats design is quite ok too other than of course some text contents and a more imposing nav menu...