www.kennphoto.com

thanks for your inputs.

I'm not really feeling the horizontal line navigational elements. Also, on my monitor, the dark grey text blends in with the black background.

Also, kill the intro.

Oh, and last thing, you can easily combine your Contact and Bio page into one. No need to have two of them, when each of them is only 2 lines long.

Nice and clean, though it requires some figuring out to navigate. A huge negative is that it doesn't scale (at least in firefox). This means when my monitor is not fully open, I can't see the bars at the bottom to navigate from picture to picture. It's nice that you can click on the picture, though again it's not immediately intuitive that you have to click on the right side to advance and the left side to go back.

If you want to keep the little horizontal nav bars, I would at least make them fatter (ie bigger clickable area, even if the gray bar itself isn't any bigger) and more contrasty (whiter).

Yep... navigation is little confusing. Top navigation is too dark and hard to see + gallery navigation requires some thinking. Landing page should have HUGE "Enter" link, i got confused. Switching between pictures is little slow.
Portfolio is great :-)

Conclusion: Don't make users think.

-It is a portrait of a photographer. No website there. OH, wait...whats this if I look hard..a link. Very bad. Ditch that asap. No one wants to stare at your portrait when they are looking to hire a photographer.
-now I click on a thumbnail and don't see the top nav unless I scroll up. Needs to be there where people can see it.


Looks good, but I'm not sure what it is for. There is nothing on the page telling me what you can do for me. It looks like a site designed by a designer to impress other designers. Not a site designed by a web designer looking to attract clients to the photographers website. 2-3 years ago this would have been a good site by those standards. However people quickly learned that they just don't work:
-visitors have no idea what to do and leave
-visitors don't realize you are for hire and leave
-google can't find it (unless there is an html version of the site behind it or other steps taken to provide 'google food')

That would make a good start to a gallery page, but for a website, scrap it and try again with something for the visitors and not other graphics artists.

Navigation needs to be simple and clear .. while I do like to see creative websites you should also consider how easy it is for potential clients to get to where they want to go without any difficulty.

While I understand your navigation concept, it was not really 100% clear to me, and I browse many dozens of websites weekly and am used to seeing different navigations. so someone who is less web savy may have real problems getting around your site.

Your photo on the splash page is not a good idea .. maybe replace with your best photo, or a photo that conveys your style.

I have currently two websites .. one specific to weddings and a second for the other parts of my business. The two things clients mention to me about websites are 1) being able to see pics right away, and 2) being able to move around the site easily.

Love your work, love the colors and fonts, hate the lack of clear navigation. It took me several seconds to figure out how to enter the site. Normally, I would have just left after a second or two of trying. It would be easy to add a little more navigation without interfering with the overall style (which I like a lot!)

Sharon

And a quick comment on loading times .. potential clients generally have a lot more patience than your fellow photographers. Someone who is spending $3-4,000 on wedding photography will wait a moment for a site to load.

With the increasing number of shooters using splash page / flash website formats everyone is used to seeing some kind of short wait for the site to load.

This is where a good splash page photo will make their wait enjoyable.

one last bit of wisdom....

design your site like everyone elses (websites in general, not photogs websites). Why? People spend more time on other sites than yours. The more you use basic accepted conventions (top horizontal nav for example) the better the experience for your visitor. Better for them, better for you.

PM me if you want some help. I am a pro photographer but my main business is flash websites for photographers and artists. What we do loads as fast or faster than standard HTML, it looks cool, and its easily navigable. Its also protects your copyright. Best yet it does not steal the thunder from your work. Too many websites show off the web designers work, not the photographs. Your images have not been optimized either - they take way too long to load. Nice image work BTW. Mark

Heather at http://www.heatherlynn.com/ did our website. She has great customer service.

Ty

www.tyholland.com

I love the work.

The website is ok. But the navigation was a bit confusing. having to click the bars to see photos didn't make itself obvious. And they were so tiny it was tedious to go through.

Ken M.

swoop wrote:
I love the work.

The website is ok. But the navigation was a bit confusing. having to click the bars to see photos didn't make itself obvious. And they were so tiny it was tedious to go through.

Ken M.

I agree with all of this and the load times being long.

And REALLY agree about your work, super!

mdude85 wrote:
I'm not really feeling the horizontal line navigational elements. Also, on my monitor, the dark grey text blends in with the black background.

ditto on that - couldn't tell them apart

The navigation of your site is confusing and frustrating. I don't like having to figure out what is what. No need to re-invent the wheel. Just stick with the web design conventions that work so well:
- links that use text
- no flash-only pages
- make sure people know where they're going

The biggest sticking point to me was the flash-only site. Flash should supplement HTML, not replace. Otherwise it makes navigation hard.

sixgun wrote:
but my main business is flash websites for photographers and artists. What we do loads as fast or faster than standard HTML,

Then rework your bio pop.. the page curl effect was cool the first time, but then its blah...

What do you charge... Maybe I'll have you work on mine... with my guidance of course

as for the OP..
Delete any navagation points that are not working... I found myself clicking on something that was not a navigation, go frustrated and closed the page....

Nice photos, but the navigation is a little too abstract and as a result it's not an easy site to explore. IMO rule #1 for any website, however artistic, is to make the navigation very easy to understand and use.

I like the minimalist design but it took a lot of experimentation for me to figure your site out, and I consider myself fairly savvy when it comes to web design. For example, there's no indication of whether I'm going back or forwards and no indication of how many images per album. The click-zone on each image is also not consistent... and once I found it I sometimes went backwards, sometimes forwards. In addition, the navigation elements are a few shades too dark and too small or close together, to the extent that I found myself peering closely at my (calibrated) monitor to see what was what, like peering into a dark cave

sixgun wrote:
Its also protects your copyright.

Not really. It's easy enough to hit "print screen" to take a screen shot, paste into your photo editing program of choice, crop and save. It's also quite easy to download the swf file and use a flash decompiler/disassembler to extract the image files. If someone is worried about people stealing their images, the tried and true watermark is far easier to use and apply.

kakomu wrote:
sixgun wrote:
Its also protects your copyright.

Not really. It's easy enough to hit "print screen" to take a screen shot, paste into your photo editing program of choice, crop and save. It's also quite easy to download the swf file and use a flash decompiler/disassembler to extract the image files. If someone is worried about people stealing their images, the tried and true watermark is far easier to use and apply.

Any site can be cracked so as to obtain the images from it. It is more difficult for a "layperson" to steal an image from a flash slideshow than from a conventional HTML page. Almost everyone knows how to save an image. Not many people know how to take a screen shot and crop out a watermark, and even fewer know how to decompile a SWF file.

If someone is worried about people stealing their images, then that person should not be uploading their images to the Internet in any fashion whatsoever.

flash sites have one other huge advantage IMO -- all the code is pre-compiled and standardized, so the site will look the same on every computer with a flash player installed.

The big problem with non-flash sites (which I'm wrestling with now) is that every browser and every version of every browser can render some aspects of html, css, js, php etc. slightly differently, so what works nicely on IE7 and Moz, for example, might not work as planned on IE 6 or Safari. It can be a royal PITA when designing a site using all those coding elements together.

mdude85 wrote:
If someone is worried about people stealing their images, then that person should not be uploading their images to the Internet in any fashion whatsoever.

THat was sort of the point I was trying to make.

pipspeak wrote:
flash sites have one other huge advantage IMO -- all the code is pre-compiled and standardized, so the site will look the same on every computer with a flash player installed.

The big problem with non-flash sites (which I'm wrestling with now) is that every browser and every version of every browser can render some aspects of html, css, js, php etc. slightly differently, so what works nicely on IE7 and Moz, for example, might not work as planned on IE 6 or Safari. It can be a royal PITA when designing a site using all those coding elements together.

If you code your sites to be compliant with HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 strict and leave out coding elements that aren't fully compatible with certain browsers, you can make your websites very homogeneous among browsers. I designed my website using plain CSS divs to be XHTML 1.0 compliant (and the W3C validator acknowledges as much). Essentially, if you're mindful of what you use and try not to use any exotic HTML markup elements, you'll be fine for the most part.

When it comes down to it, I take the simplicity approach to web site design. The site should be more about information than presentation: Substance over style.

you have nice pics but not the best medium to show them off.

If the pics were bigger that would rule.

What everyone else has said is spot on- the dark grey fails completely in making the site easy to navigate. Scrolling down on pages is a big no-no and just pisses me off since 99% of other photographers websites I don't have to.

The font just plain sucks. It looks like a 1980s font when screens had about 20 pixels on them.

There's a big bar of black space at the top that takes up about an inch or so on my screen, lose that and you'll fit a lot more on and your pictures are so so so small.