Review Please! Steve's Blue Ridge Snaps

Welcome to the forums, Steve, and thanks for reviewing some other sites first!!

When I open your site I see what looks like a big ad slapped in the middle of it. I'm using Opera 8.0. I can't seem to get rid of it so I'm going to swtich browsers and see if that helps. I'ts doing similarly weird things in Firefox too. I have FF set to notify me of any cookies being set and your ads are setting a lot of them. I don't like it when ads try to set cookies on my computer.

Now I still can't see the site with that big ad in the way, so I'll try IE. oh, okay, now I see the little close box. Even in IE it was really messed up. I'd suggest losing those ads - or is this a free hosting service you're using? A proper domain name and hosting is so cheap these days, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to pay for it. A domain name might cost you about $8 and hosting for a few dollars a month. Argh! And that ad comes up on every page too!!

Now that I can see more of the site I think you really need to work on your graphics. As a photographer you should have some talent for this, and you should have a good program to work with (such as Adobe Photoshop). The site, first of all, needs a good graphic header of some sort. Look around at what other sites are doing to get ideas. You already have lots of great photos to work with so start from there. My favourite strategy for a graphic header (as seen on my own site!) is to take a nice photo, blow it up to some interesting angle, and put your site title on top in an interesting font. Quick, easy, and good looking

You could also try to experiment with some more colour - the black background is a good start (often a mistake, but IMO the a good choice for photography and art sites). Try adding some other colours.

The layout could also use more structure, with areas for each type of content (logo, navigation bar, content etc.). Content areas are easily separated by lines or coloured backgrounds. Again, look at other sites to see what they are doing. You do have a navigation menu on the front page but it doesn't appear on the other pages.

Finally, fonts are a really important aspect of good design. The default font, Times New Roman, rarely looks good on a screen. Instead, try a sans serif like verdana or tahoma. Those would look particularly good with your design, although some serifs like Georgia also look good.

It looks like you're doing a pretty good job with your code - are you doing that fully by hand? good work to add in the CSS for links and such. And valid too! In the future you'll want to work towards using more CSS and fewer tables for layout.

I'd really like to look at your photos more closely but I that ad is really annoying me! As a photographer you'll probably want a more detailed copyright statement, detailing how and when the photos may be used by others.

Yes all the coding is done by hand. I use Coffee Cup but only for the easy use of the browser function. Otherwise it's just a fancy note pad to me. I'm still working on these pages, like I said it's an up-grade attempt to an old format I once used.

I'm doing it like Johnny Cashes Cadillac, a piece at a time. . I'll look into some of the other suggestions while I am at it.
It is a free host, I thought it might not be to bad, and I definitely did not want banners. It seems the code writers for banners cannot get it right, they do not justify. If you go to the trouble to make your pages justify, you do not want banners on top of it that don't. I am definitely going to look into something else when I finish tuning this thing up.

I asume you are using free hosting
hence the subdimain and the ads that are so annoying i would rather blow my nose off slowly with a bb gun than sit and look at them.

If your looking for a free webhosting service this one is good

111mb.com
They give you perl and php access 111mbs and 1 mysql databases wich is all anyone needs
they dont have any anoying popups either just google ads at the bottem of your page.

Youve now got a better site, And you take into heart that a good background for displaying photographs are black... thats cool, a better font for text other than the one youre using would have been better. Oh a custom title would help your site a lot...

No more adds.

http://blueridgesnaps.50webs.com/

Site looks great! nice photos.

I agree loseing the add helps a lot looks great has a nice feel to it

i liked your site but have you thought about changing and reducing the font size a bit to give it a more professional look?
Thanks
Mary

The font size is 3 bold Times New Roman, with my browser set to medium fonts, using IE 6. What is your browser set to, and are you using IE. just curious; it helps to know these things. To me it doesn't seem to large, but thats me.

You know what i thought might be good, if you change your banner to an image and put a hint of purple around the text. It would match the camera. Maybe around the welcome to.

That would be a workable idea; but the index page is already about 85% or so img. files. The more you have the slower you load you know. That would be my only complaint about 50webs so far. They are a little slow on loading graphics, but at least they are steady. I have been on servers that were really slow, and would leave some half loaded.

actuly compared to a lot of sites you have few images on your homepage, but if you are woried about load time you could always compress the images way down

I played around with the idea some this morning, Didn't really come up with anything I like yet, but I'll keep on keeping on. I'm not to worried about graphic size on that, you can compress a header file even further than an image, before you loose to much quality. But I'll have to do to the rest too, thats what I am worried about.

heres some background for you steve
place your text over it

click the link

http://www.webmaster-forums.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=92&stc=1

hope you like it

Heres one I came up with.

Always use width and height tags with images, without then the page is very jumpy on a slower connection (dialup).

You have some great pics there, the album pages (full page) needs to have your banner on them, if somone was to come to a page via search engine or other they would a/ could miss out on the others b/ not se the copyright notice and c/ have no idea who you are.

A trick I have seen with thumb nails, and works well on black background is to use a border of 1 or 2 on your images, depending on your theme (which you don't have), you could use like a grey as normal and on hover goes to a purple or something, probably not the green/red you're using now thou - use seperate CSS class.