The quality of the images on the site for sale and in the design is very poor. Heavy artifacting on the site design, and the images for sale have poor lighting and focus.
In general, there is little "design" in how the site functions, though it functions as expected, the lack of visual structure lends a feeling of amateurism that the photos do not contradict.
Essentially, the quality and attention to detail is very low.
There are a few photos by other photographers that are good, but not worth $20 when competing with istockphoto.com where simply fantastic photos can be had for $.50 to $1.50 a piece.
Worse, the "watermark" is ineffective on some photos for the larger image as it doesn't prevent its use and the "enlarged image" is actually full-size. For other images, the "enlarged image" is only a few pixels bigger and is unusable for determining even the objects IN the photo.
Welcome to TWF, Dayze! Thanks for looking at some other sites before posting your own. We really appreciate your help. I'm just going to edit your thread title according to our
posting agreement.
About your site, I agree with Suzanne about the level of professionalism here. There are also some serious grammatical errors in your opening statement that need to be corrected (sell s/b sale, individual person s/b individual people or individuals, uses s/b use etc.) It reads like english isn't your first language. If that's the case, get a native speaker to go over this for you.
You've got some okay basics here - a nice logo, good site concept etc. It just needs some improvements, that's all.
Thank you to Megan for smoothing my bluntness! Welcome to TWF -- I hope the critiques will help you hone your work.
My first critique shocked me to my core. I was astonished and in tears. But I came back for more and learned that the people who don't pull their punches are the biggest help in identifying the little things that influence others without necessarily those others being aware of it.
Please don't take this the wrong way, because I'm only trying to help. That said, you are never going to sell any of those photos.
The site design is very unprofessional, and the photos being offered are of very poor quality. Many of the frames are not filled, the exposure is off with prints being too dark or too light, and you are not using filters, so many of your nature shots look foggy.
You have a very nice eye for photographs, but you really need to learn how to shoot better before trying to sell your work. There are some popular sites offering VERY high quality stock photography for free. I enjoy amateur photography in my spare time, and I contribute my work for free as well. If you want to sell your photos, they are going to need to be nearly perfect, and they need to be VERY large (probably 6 megapixels).
Sorry to be rough on your site, I know how it feels. After my first round here, I scrapped my design and started from scratch! But honestly, I am just trying to be helpful.
If you would like, I can recommend some EXCELLENT books on digital photography that really helped me out. Many of my pictures were turning out like yours until I studied the process and understood my mistakes.
The site colors are very bad, hard to read any text on the site. The images for sale are low quality, and nothing spectacular. I would try to go for an easier design on the eyes. Your purple/black is hard to look at. I cant even read the type of categories you have available.
Thanks for the harshness. I guess i should have explained that the pricinging is not set in just yet and the photos that are currently on the site are low end. However, this will not be the case. I did not want to put everything on the site at this time until I get everything worked out perfectly, so no one would take the good ones. So I upload my low end stuff and watermarked quicky to make sure everything functioned well. In the future it will not hurt for these photos to be mixed among the professional photos. The newer photos will display first anyways even when a search is done.
I thought the colors where alittle to dark on the text but I wanted some feed back. Spelling is an easy fix but again I need some feedback before I continued twicking it more. I was concerned I might scrap the whole layout and have to start over if it did not function properly.
The links are very hard to see on black so was straining to see what they were.
Viewing the pages I get a biggish horziontal scroll bar at 800x600.
You say a lot of the content is temporary, so I wont mention a lot of them, some advice thou, use the full name of the photographers, just having "Joe" sounds like the neighbours kid. You didn't mention the banner, so if you do choose to keep that one or that style, blend the photos together instead of having that sharp edge, or seperate them more using a white or black line between them.
Some of those pages take forever to load on dialup, maybe make the thumbnails half the size they are now.
Don't use the width and height tags to resize images
Your no right click script from CodeLifter doesn't work on all browsers either. use watermarking, a transparent "sample" across the image or something
I clicked on "In cart" (shouldnt that be "buy me" or something) and the screen refreshed but nothing else happened.
Your checkout page, the text is cut off, the line:
Note: Your "Visitors Cart" contents will be merged with your "Members Cart" conte
once you have logged on. [More Info]
ends there. Your stylesheet isn't there, should be at the root (according to your style tag) but its not, so the bits you dont use font tags on are being shown as default.
To add to what Busy said, it would probably be a good idea to make sure that your markup validates as well. If you are planning a serious e-commerce site, you want to make sure that you are 100% standards compliant so your page will load consistently on different browsers.
Validation is a free, automated service, and you can do it right at the W3C's validation website. I prefer to have my sites validate to XHTML 1.0, but you can also validate to the HTML 4.01 standard. Along with that, you should also validate your CSS (StyleSheets). It only takes a few moments to check this out, and it can be a great help.
I'll keep checking back for your design changes and new pictures and post accordingly.
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Suzanne posted this at 15:48 — 30th April 2004.
She has: 5,507 posts
Joined: Feb 2000
The quality of the images on the site for sale and in the design is very poor. Heavy artifacting on the site design, and the images for sale have poor lighting and focus.
In general, there is little "design" in how the site functions, though it functions as expected, the lack of visual structure lends a feeling of amateurism that the photos do not contradict.
Essentially, the quality and attention to detail is very low.
There are a few photos by other photographers that are good, but not worth $20 when competing with istockphoto.com where simply fantastic photos can be had for $.50 to $1.50 a piece.
Worse, the "watermark" is ineffective on some photos for the larger image as it doesn't prevent its use and the "enlarged image" is actually full-size. For other images, the "enlarged image" is only a few pixels bigger and is unusable for determining even the objects IN the photo.
Megan posted this at 17:39 — 30th April 2004.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
Welcome to TWF, Dayze! Thanks for looking at some other sites before posting your own. We really appreciate your help. I'm just going to edit your thread title according to our
posting agreement.
About your site, I agree with Suzanne about the level of professionalism here. There are also some serious grammatical errors in your opening statement that need to be corrected (sell s/b sale, individual person s/b individual people or individuals, uses s/b use etc.) It reads like english isn't your first language. If that's the case, get a native speaker to go over this for you.
You've got some okay basics here - a nice logo, good site concept etc. It just needs some improvements, that's all.
Megan
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Suzanne posted this at 17:57 — 30th April 2004.
She has: 5,507 posts
Joined: Feb 2000
Thank you to Megan for smoothing my bluntness!
Welcome to TWF -- I hope the critiques will help you hone your work.
My first critique shocked me to my core. I was astonished and in tears. But I came back for more and learned that the people who don't pull their punches are the biggest help in identifying the little things that influence others without necessarily those others being aware of it.
So basically I'm harsh because I care.
strobe posted this at 19:25 — 30th April 2004.
They have: 27 posts
Joined: Jan 2004
Please don't take this the wrong way, because I'm only trying to help. That said, you are never going to sell any of those photos.
The site design is very unprofessional, and the photos being offered are of very poor quality. Many of the frames are not filled, the exposure is off with prints being too dark or too light, and you are not using filters, so many of your nature shots look foggy.
You have a very nice eye for photographs, but you really need to learn how to shoot better before trying to sell your work. There are some popular sites offering VERY high quality stock photography for free. I enjoy amateur photography in my spare time, and I contribute my work for free as well. If you want to sell your photos, they are going to need to be nearly perfect, and they need to be VERY large (probably 6 megapixels).
Sorry to be rough on your site, I know how it feels. After my first round here, I scrapped my design and started from scratch! But honestly, I am just trying to be helpful.
If you would like, I can recommend some EXCELLENT books on digital photography that really helped me out. Many of my pictures were turning out like yours until I studied the process and understood my mistakes.
Best of luck! Craig
Visit me online!
about me - my website - my photos
aifamdotcom posted this at 19:36 — 30th April 2004.
They have: 36 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
The site colors are very bad, hard to read any text on the site. The images for sale are low quality, and nothing spectacular. I would try to go for an easier design on the eyes. Your purple/black is hard to look at. I cant even read the type of categories you have available.
http://www.yourwatch.net
Save Money Today We mail rebate checks to you. Save upto an additional 30% at online stores such as Overstock.com and OfficeDepot.com
dayzeday posted this at 20:36 — 30th April 2004.
She has: 6 posts
Joined: Apr 2004
Thanks for the harshness. I guess i should have explained that the pricinging is not set in just yet and the photos that are currently on the site are low end. However, this will not be the case. I did not want to put everything on the site at this time until I get everything worked out perfectly, so no one would take the good ones. So I upload my low end stuff and watermarked quicky to make sure everything functioned well. In the future it will not hurt for these photos to be mixed among the professional photos. The newer photos will display first anyways even when a search is done.
I thought the colors where alittle to dark on the text but I wanted some feed back. Spelling is an easy fix but again I need some feedback before I continued twicking it more. I was concerned I might scrap the whole layout and have to start over if it did not function properly.
Did the site overall Function properly?
Dayze Day
Creative Daze Design
www.creativedazedesign.com
[[email protected]][email protected][/EMAIL]
Busy posted this at 22:05 — 30th April 2004.
He has: 6,151 posts
Joined: May 2001
The links are very hard to see on black so was straining to see what they were.
Viewing the pages I get a biggish horziontal scroll bar at 800x600.
You say a lot of the content is temporary, so I wont mention a lot of them, some advice thou, use the full name of the photographers, just having "Joe" sounds like the neighbours kid. You didn't mention the banner, so if you do choose to keep that one or that style, blend the photos together instead of having that sharp edge, or seperate them more using a white or black line between them.
Some of those pages take forever to load on dialup, maybe make the thumbnails half the size they are now.
Don't use the width and height tags to resize images
Your no right click script from CodeLifter doesn't work on all browsers either. use watermarking, a transparent "sample" across the image or something
I clicked on "In cart" (shouldnt that be "buy me" or something) and the screen refreshed but nothing else happened.
Your checkout page, the text is cut off, the line:
Note: Your "Visitors Cart" contents will be merged with your "Members Cart" conte
once you have logged on. [More Info]
ends there. Your stylesheet isn't there, should be at the root (according to your style tag) but its not, so the bits you dont use font tags on are being shown as default.
strobe posted this at 22:35 — 30th April 2004.
They have: 27 posts
Joined: Jan 2004
To add to what Busy said, it would probably be a good idea to make sure that your markup validates as well. If you are planning a serious e-commerce site, you want to make sure that you are 100% standards compliant so your page will load consistently on different browsers.
Validation is a free, automated service, and you can do it right at the W3C's validation website. I prefer to have my sites validate to XHTML 1.0, but you can also validate to the HTML 4.01 standard. Along with that, you should also validate your CSS (StyleSheets). It only takes a few moments to check this out, and it can be a great help.
I'll keep checking back for your design changes and new pictures and post accordingly.
Good luck!
Visit me online!
about me - my website - my photos
Want to join the discussion? Create an account or log in if you already have one. Joining is fast, free and painless! We’ll even whisk you back here when you’ve finished.