REVIEW REQUEST: Richard Nicholson Photography

This is pretty nice. I've done photography web sites and this is what you want - clean and simple. Keep the focus on the photography. Unfortunately, I've not alway succeeded in convincing my own clients of this.

Just a few things...

Maybe it's just me but the arrows in your portfolio section weren't immediately obvious as such. At first I assumed that they were just bracketing the "menu" option.

The other thing is that you may want to reconsider the text on your "about" page. Having it depicted as a graphic will make the search engines unable to index the content.

You are right that frames are totally unnecessary here but quite frankly, I may not have noticed them had you not mentioned it.

Very fine work for a first site. Very fine work period. Do not hesitate to provide input in the other threads. It's not all about coding you know, a feel for layout and design is an invaluable asset.

Welcome to TWF. As Taff said your comments will be very welcome and as you are not a 'website designer' (as you put it!) your comments on design, colours, etc will be more valuable.

As this is your first site may I say CONGRATULATIONS! You have done what is necessary to show off your photographs very well. I'm not overly keen on black for backgrounds but here it works well.

How many pages do you have in total? As many of the pages don't really have much content they probably wouldn't get indexed by the search engines so using the 'no frames' section and putting the code for that page together in an optimised search engine friendly manner will help with rankings (if they go passed the splash page) by putting a good amount of text in there and links to all your other pages. Definitely never put paragraphs of text on a page as a graphic as this is no help at all for either search engines or for the visually impared who may copy the text to enlarge it to read it better.

Very good job indeed

WOW I'm impressed!!

I think it looks really nice. The only thing I see is some of your images look like they have been optimized a tad too much. Other than that looks great. You even made the frames look good.

Nice man. I like the photo in las vegas at the airport. I can't believe there is no one around.

Great looking site! To do away with the frames you may want to consider something like SSI (server side includes) if your host allows it.

If its your first site then pat your self on the back (hard to believe its a first site)

you mention its for agencies and editors etc, so I'd be inclined to loose the splash page, the splash page is great, love the photo but agencies and editors get so much stuff sent to them a splash page is just wasted time, maybe make it into more a first page than splash, have your links and details etc on it.
Also loose the frames
the links, you have them as graphics, since you site is graphic intense (sites contents) use CSS (a:link, a:visited, a:active and a:hover) for a similar effect which wont show down your loading time. the a:hover changes the links color on mouseover, you can also have underlines turned off for normal links, and underline on moouseover and/or on page your on.
I'd also put your name and copyright on the actual picture instead of beside it, to easy to just crop and use them as is.
some pages have more thumbnails than others, maybe split the ones with more onto two pages.

Forgot to mention I like the black background, gives it a bit of depth

Keep up the good work, welcome to TWF btw

Very nice. Loads fast and has a very simple layout, which is very easy to navigate. Perfect.

I would get rid of the entrance page. I almost didn't go in. Most web newbies wouldn't know to click the image to enter.

It views well in IE 5.5, Netscape 4.7, 8x6 and a 15" monitor.

All you need now is a mailing list email subscribe pop up form.

IE5.5
800x600
DSL
13"

"p.s. I'll get on with reviewing 3 sites posted on this forum, though as I've said I'm a beginner and therefore not sure if I can I contribute much of value... "

Fantastic site for a beginner or a professional. Perhaps since you are so talented at capturing images on film, you were able to create such an aesthetically pleasing site on your first pass.

The entire layout and use of colors are wonderful. The black background makes the photographs really stand out - as they should. I even like the two colors, font (is that Baha?), and use of upper/lower case for the richardnicholsonPHOTPGRAPHY.

The ONLY thing I saw that was the least bit off was your copyright notice is very faint and almost impossible to read.

Excellent work on the site and I enjoyed many of your photos too, particularly 4/6 from 24 Hours in Beirut, Mount Fuji from the plane and Zabriskie Point in the Las Vegas series.

Deborah

Well I finally got round to posting some comments about other peoples' sites, so now I can get back to the thread I started.

Firstly thank you all for taking the time to review my site. It is of course gratifying to get such positive input. Thanks.

To the person who questioned (jokingly) whether it really was my first site - well it is, but please don't think that I'm claiming to have knocked it out over a weekend - it's taken me six months, on and off, to get it where it is now. Of course now that I've read the Dreamweaver Bible (well, some of it) and Martin Evening's Photoshop book, I could build a site a lot quicker. But it still takes me an hour to scan and optimize each image (I'm fussy). So with my site that's at least 100 hours just to prepare the images. (how do you web-designers make this work commercially?)

CSS and SSI were both mentioned (thanks for the link on SSI). I'll do some reading and consider using both on the next incarnation of my site.

The point about my navigation system not being totally clear is a good one (it looks like this: < menu >). I plan to replace the arrows with the more standard triangles and the 'menu' with a little grid (to signify thumbnails). To some users it still won't be totally obvious, but at least it will look less like inert type. (At one point I had roll-overs here saying 'previous' 'menu' 'next' but it looked untidy, and I figured most of my users would work it out.)

Copyright - a few points here. I tried different ways of marking my images with a copyright notice and in the end I decided to put the notice along the side of the image. I thought it got in the way sat on top of the image. I put '©richardnicholson.com' rather than '©richard nicholson' because I want anyone who drags one of my JPEGs to their desktop to have an easy way to contact me if they want to use it. Of course they could easily crop out the notice in Photoshop. But if I found them using the image they could no longer plead ignorance. I've toyed with various methods of stopping people right-clicking images - the neatest one involves placing your image as the background and then overlaying it with a transparent gif - but at the end of the day it is always possible to do a screen grab... It seems to me that the best copyright protection is to only upload relatively small images. This makes them practically useless in any context other than the web.

Lose the splash screen? I'm inclined to keep it just because I want to place a copyright notice at the beginning of my site, where other elements are not competing for attention. (Someone said the copyright noitce is hard to read - you mean this one, here on the splash page? - I know there's a strong case for using HTML text, but does anyone have any tips for making legible small text as a graphic - I'm making my text in Photoshop but as I decrease the font size it falls apart.)

Search-engines. No-one is going to lift my images if they can't find them. I'm still not sure whether I want search engines to index my site. Someone said:

'As many of the pages don't really have much content they probably wouldn't get indexed by the search engines so using the 'no frames' section and putting the code for that page together in an optimised search engine friendly manner will help with rankings (if they go passed the splash page) by putting a good amount of text in there and links to all your other pages'

That makes sense. In fact if that works, and if I insist on keeping my splash page, then maybe I should include some invisible frame in the splash page - then I can enter all sorts of info in the 'no frames' section that will get my site into the search engines (but which surfers will not see). Flawed thinking?

You say that my image pages don't have much indexable content - but they do all have a caption (in HTML text) and also each JPEG has a relevant name (e.g the name of the person shown in the picture). Does anyone know how Google Images - or similar image search engines - work? I'd like to figure this out - and then decide whether to set up my site to encourage Google or repel it.

Actually at this point I definitely want to get as much of my site indexed as possibe - if, after six months, I find that my picures are appearing unauthorized on other websites, I can always backtrack and try to make my site less publicly visible.

A few other points: too many thumbnails in one of the sections (yes, I know, I'll fix it), 'is that Baha?' (that's shorthand for Bauhaus? yes, it's Bauhaus for the logo, Univers for the smaller type, and Verdana for the HTML text), not sure about black backgrounds (me neither, it all started out on white, and then pale grey, but then I started to think of the monitor as a lightbox and the images seemed to have more of an impact with a black surround).

If you read all that, thanks for your time!

Richard

Quote: Originally posted by focusfinder
To the person who questioned (jokingly) whether it really was my first site - well it is, but please don't think that I'm claiming to have knocked it out over a weekend - it's taken me six months, on and off, to get it where it is now. Of course now that I've read the Dreamweaver Bible (well, some of it) and Martin Evening's Photoshop book, I could build a site a lot quicker. But it still takes me an hour to scan and optimize each image (I'm fussy). So with my site that's at least 100 hours just to prepare the images. (how do you web-designers make this work commercially?)

The more you do, the easier it will be, the faster you get ... plus there are programs that can do it for you.

As for the search engine thingy, depends if you want your site noticed as in advertising, or just as a client/agent view point. wouldnt hurt to make it availiable for everyone, you never know you could get some work out of it.
there is a few threads in the webmaster section about protecting images etc, could be worth a look.

when you use images for text, becareful which fonts you use, some dont decrease well, also make sure antilias is turned off (unchecked)

Quote: Originally posted by focusfinder
But it still takes me an hour to scan and optimize each image (I'm fussy). So with my site that's at least 100 hours just to prepare the images. (how do you web-designers make this work commercially?)

We try to keep our photographer clientele to a minimum

I just popped back in to defend the splash page. Keep it! Opponents of splash pages say they are gratuitous and I agree to a point - about as gratuitous as a book cover.

In your case, as you point out, the into is not purely without purpose. It provides you with an opportunity to present your copyright information up front and without distractions.

Regarding graphic text, I've never found Photoshop particularly good for this purpose. I use the now defunct Adobe ImageStyler for text graphics. I can't tell you if ImageReady is a decent replacement for this or not.

You may want to try Macromedia Fireworks as well for web graphics but nothing beats photoshop for the photography itself.

Regarding image protection, none of the tricks you mention are really foolproof. If it's up there, it is potentially out there. Lower graphic quality is protection but in your case especially, a double-edged sword.

I've found visible watermarks, especially if they are partially obscuring, on the larger images, like Corbis and Eyewire, are particularly effective as protection from light fingered surfers, but if you're selling the images, you have to just be viligant with tracking them.