Having finally found that wordpress powered websites were too restrictive for me, I've moved to a site powered by squarespace. I'd appreciate your comments/improvements. It's very much a work in progress.
Why make the blog the default landing of your site, vs. your photography? Have you done any kind of traffic analysis to demonstrate that the same IPs are coming in repeatedly and being drawn in by regularly-updated blog content?
I think you have to decide which is the primary draw of your site: blog content or portfolio content. One can certainly bolster the other but only one can be the site's primary purpose...right now it feels like that's the blog. In fact, if I'd come to the site without context I would have assumed it was just a blog, probably missing your portfolio altogether.
I'd also question the order of the links on the nav bar...I think those should cascade in an order of decreasing relevance to a viewer, as a western visitor is going to read them from left to right. Is "about" really more important and relevant than "photography"? If I only click on one or two things before leaving your site, do you want those things to be "about" and "polar expeditions"?
I'm also not in love with the RSS feed of your Twitter posts...it feels a little like oversharing and the lack of carriage returns between them makes it really hard to read.
shatterkiss wrote:
I'd also question the order of the links on the nav bar...I think those should cascade in an order of decreasing relevance to a viewer, as a western visitor is going to read them from left to right. Is "about" really more important and relevant than "photography"? If I only click on one or two things before leaving your site, do you want those things to be "about" and "polar expeditions"?
I don't think ordering by decreasing "relevance" (relevance to whom?) is a good idea, since the most relevant words in a sentence are not always at the beginning. The navigation should be ordered according to the natural flow of the user's intuition when interacting with the navigation. Where is the user most likely to go first? Second? Third? Last? The user might first want to learn about a photographer, then see examples of the photographer's work and then contact them for a quote, even if the photographer feels like contacting him is the most relevant or important action that needs to be taken.
From a navigation standpoint, I think the elements are in a suitable order, even if you just compared the order with a number of other successful navigations. Of course not all are the same, but there are some general trends to be noted.
mdude85 wrote:
The navigation should be ordered according to the natural flow of the user's intuition when interacting with the navigation. Where is the user most likely to go first? Second? Third? Last? The user might first want to learn about a photographer, then see examples of the photographer's work and then contact them for a quote, even if the photographer feels like contacting him is the most relevant or important action that needs to be taken.
That's exactly what I mean by "relevance". You have to anticipate your audience with any site, then anticipate your audience's interests or needs. Whether you do that by guessing, by focus-grouping, by following industry practices, by analyzing traffic metrics...that's up to you. But you need to design a site around an idea of what your visitors want, not what you want them to want. So "relevance" is a measure of how related something is to what your visitors want.
The idea of the most relevant information sometimes being in the middle of a sentence...that works for natural language but it doesn't work for what are essentially bulleted lists. With each successive bullet that isn't of interest to a viewer they're less likely to continue to the next: it's like the concept of "lead-ins" with tv shows, the ratings of the show at 10pm are highly dependent on the show at 9pm providing it with viewers...but if people leave a channel because 9pm sucks they don't come back for 10pm. Think about your first visit to a blog that you've never read before...if the first post isn't interesting to you, and the second isn't interesting to you, you'll be reading the third and fourth with less focus if you read them at all. Same goes with nav bar entries: the later in succession they get the less attention they'll get. So you need to prioritize them in some way with the understanding that the entries at the end of the list will receive less attention if the entries that preceded them weren't of interest to a viewer.
So, in this case, I almost didn't make it to "photography" because "blog" and "polar expeditions" weren't interesting to me. In fact, I almost didn't see that photography was there because it was buried among things that felt unrelated.
shatterkiss wrote:
So, in this case, I almost didn't make it to "photography" because "blog" and "polar expeditions" weren't interesting to me. In fact, I almost didn't see that photography was there because it was buried among things that felt unrelated.
Well, at the very least, the website is no longer centered around photography, since he gives equal billing to being a photographer, a public speaker and a polar explorer. I think one thing we can agree on is that this site diminishes the website's role as a photography portfolio and is more of a 'catch-all' page, which is probably why you almost missed the photography completely. It seems like most of the photography is polar, so maybe the OP can have a subsection of polar photography under polar expeditions, or alternatively, a subsection of polar photography under the main photography link.
My main point was that excluding "filler" such as interests and hobbies, the navigation ordering is "sound" (putting Home and About at the beginning, filler in the middle and Contact at the end).
Speaking of missing items, I nearly missed the "Photographic microsite". I think the OP should make that link a lot more prominent.
Thanks for the various opinions! I'll look at the page order - lots of sites have ABOUT straight after HOME so I followed suit. No particular reason.
Having the blog as a landing page is again a fashion I've seen a lot and didn't want to throw people straight into a context-less photo gallery or use a pointless homepage with picture and welcome message.Thoughts?
In terms of the design, layout, any thoughts?
I'll try and make the twitter section easier to read.
I think a blog is only really effective if you maybe post a few photos from each assignment/job you complete to display what you can do, but stuff that wouldn't necessarily land in your portfolio.
No one really cares what your thoughts are on anything else unless you are big time like Chase Jarvis or Laforet.
alexhibbert wrote:
Thanks. I've made the twitter bit clearer and am working on improving the photography page.
Regarding text size, I've compared it to loads of websites (google, yahoo, dpreview etc.) and it's the same or bigger than theirs?
A.
Yes, but the primary content column in those sites is not as wide as your site. If your text is small then the column that the text is contained in should not be very wide.
mdude85 wrote:
... The user might first want to learn about a photographer, then see examples of the photographer's work and then contact them for a quote ...
I tend to think that "showing pictures", next "learn bout the photographer" and next" contact them" is the more proper/logic sequence, no ?
I am attracted by someone's pictures, not as much in the photographer !
When I love them, I want to get to know the person behind the camera and next might want to contact them.
