What do you think? ICHOR Gallery

This is a well designed site. I'm at a loss to find anything really wrong with this.

Personally I don't like the background I'd go for something much paler, it seems to detract from the top banner image.

You need to get more links to improve your search engine rankings and increase your pagerank. Start with the free directories - let me know if you want a couple of good lists of free directories. Don't submit to too many at once, that could get you sandboxed, and vary the anchor text and description as much as possible (Google may be devaluing links that all have the same anchor text).

Otherwise well done and good luck.

good advice about the anchor text in back links.... i have alot of problems with google so thats appreciated! I am currently submitting the site to more directories and art sites but google doesnt recognise even a fraction of them so that could be the problem...
Really pleased to her good comments! Thanx!

Ok I was goin to give you comments when you asked for it on another thread, but you havent posted your site for critique in this area so now that it is, here are my two cents...

You have a Clear and clean design, I commend you for that, I understand the pale yellow background coz the combination it gets from that red shade is more like an old engish art site that really works for ichor, Your font size is appropriate too, my concern however is that you can make a better header than the one you have now, also your naviation at the top could be a little better too... The first thing for you to do now is to change your link colors from the default blue to another, the site graphics are a little jagged you could anti-alias them... Also the links at the left could be arranged much clearer... The contents are good though, but those factors I outlined could bring a better view and usability for your site.

I think this is okay. The design is passable - better than other similar sites I've seen. The graphics do leave a lot to be desired. What you could do is use some of the artists work as a base and then put a simple title on top. The font you've chosen is okay but the acronym is way too big and the subtitle isn't placed very well.

I am confused about what ICHOR stands for - that should be spelled out under the title.

The red headers on the site are also much too big. In general I think you shoudl try to avoid boxing everything up like this. It looks choppy and very inelegant.

It is nice to have a good text description of what the site is about but this one is taking up more space than it needs to. Right now I'm reading Steve Krug's Designing Web Usability and he's got a whole chapter on introduction text. A person whould be able to arrive at the site and know what this is, what they can do here, where to start, (and I forget what the 4th one was). Your introduciton text is pushing the "what can I do here" but down further on the screen and it won't show up for most people before they scroll. Everything after the first paragraph can be removed, which will push the thumbnails up further and allow people to jump right in.

Reading the actual text - I don't know what giclees means. More accessible language would be beneficial here I think.

Looking at the navigation - some of the labels are really unclear here. I should know what to expect when I click on something. "The Battle Scene" is particularly confusing, as is "publicity" ("Media Room" might be better), and to a lesser extent "Artists at Work". I'm also a little confused about the difference between "Prints" and "Gallery"

Text on the content pages should not be centered - this makes it harder to read because the eye has to jump back and forth for each line.

No need for a "back" button in the navigation area - everyone, even the most newbie of newbies, knows how to use their browser's back button.

Changing the left navigation on every page is a little confusing. I would remove that for the front page so the subnavigation only appears on sub-pages. If I start navigation from the left side it's really disorienting when it disappears. There should also be a link back to the home page either from the logo or from the top navbar - that circle thingy isn't intuitive enough.

Good job linking to bigger versions of the artwork and images throughout the site. I think you could go one step further and link to an even bigger version from the indvidual painting pages.

Browsing the gallery - I'm a little confused because all of the work listed here seems to be sold - is everything in this section sold? If so, it should be labelled that way (or maybe it is but I just didn't see the text).

These are mainly usability problems. The design could use some work as well but I won't go into too much detail on that. Once you get more experience with web design you'll be able to improve that. Something cleaner and more elegant would be better here, with more sophisticated design.

Re: Megan's point about the word Giclee. You could use acronym tags for non-hyperlinked text which will give a tool tip to the user. Here is the code:

Word

I'm personally not very keen on the design, it's just not very modern and consequently doesn't look too professional. I also thought it was a joke first of all when i first saw art by Marian 'Fanny' Christian but that's probably just the immature side of me!

-Rob

Good site. Nicely manged gallery.

wow , impressive ...

very neat collection!! .. i saved some of the imaged , they are great for siggy making (not a prof siggy maker , just for my own use once in a while)

one thing i noticed was that the images being of different sizes are not displayed in a fixed layout on their resp. pages.... may be you can design a fixe table with fixed cell widths that match the largest image and all images are aligned in some perfect order ...

just wondering on the name .. chor in hindi means 'thief' , i hope ichor doesnt imply u are stealing .. just kidding

very nice website ..

I cant see the text below the ICHOR heading, just the tops of the letters. What does it say? I presume it is because my browser is set to 800 x 600. Spiral image is good as is the ICHOR logo.

Make the garlic photo bigger! Is it garlic? I hate photos that are so small as to be hard to make out. If it's a good photo and relevant to your site make it visible. I like the dark red colour but there are two different shades of dark red on the home page. Maybe fix that up, consistency is good.

Seems to be easy to navigate and the text on the home page explains things fairly well.

Blue

Cheers for all your comments guys... i've taken in all your comments and have made changes because of them... so thanx!

But if i could ask one more thing... if you were a potential customer, what would you think? What kind of impression does the site give you?

Really interested to hear what you think!

Mike Hannon