Howdy,

I just set up a new website and would be interested if you could give me some impartial advice as to the first impressions, ease of navigation and overall experience?

It is still a work in progress with regards to uploading pictures and video but the framework and infrastructure is intact.

Thank you for your time!

Here is the link:

Tez M Photo

Your site looks nice and professional, but here are a few criticisms (please don't be offended by my bluntness):

1. Web sites don't need front doors. I would loose the "Enter Website"/"Go To Blog" Page. This is really poor, ca. 1995 design.
2. The bottom navigation requires a hover and then a click to expose the menu choices, followed by another click to select each menu item. I don't personally like drop down/fly out menus, but if you have to use them, it should be hover click, not hover click click.
3. You have way too many keywords in your keyword meta tag. This may negatively affect you with Google search ranking, and definitely will not help you.
4. Although Google does index Flash text to some extent, the fact that your entire website is flash based (as opposed to html/css) may negatively affect you in search engine ranking.
5. The on page scroll bar on your contact page is bad form, although, you may not have a choice because of the use of Flash. Please note that I viewed your site with a net book PC.
6. WRT your bio: Don't apologize for being who you are. Your bio should express confidence and competence. The grammar and punctuation probably need a tweak. Is there value to your potential clients in knowing the make and model of your equipment? I don't see how this can possibly help you. Same comment about the scroll bars as in #5 above.

I hope this helps.

Alan

Tez, I'd agree and disagree with Alan on a couple of points:

1. ditch the 'entrance' page, just not needed.
2. flash is very tough for search engines to navigate and index properly, so be aware of that. Your site may be hard to find or even invisible to search engines, depending on how the flash was done. Even then, flash is almost never as searchable and indexable (is that a word?) as plain old html
3. this is where I disagree...keywords in your meta tags have no bearing on anything. In fact, you're wasting time by putting them in. That's old school, search engines no longer pay attention to meta keywords (read up on Search Engine Optimization for more info).

John

thanks for the replies. To tell you the truth, I know jackall about keywording, and optimization in that department- i just put in whatever I could think of that would possibly help. I wasn't aware it would have detrimental effects on the actual searchability of the website.

Any tips to make it more palatable to google etc?

I can't see a scroll bar on the contact page on my 16" monitor here. I'm using a laptop and i unfortunately didn't have a choice with regards to this. It is a template site and as such my options as to customisation are limited.

as for the equipment list: well, this was a little self-indulgent but I know that many new photographers are interested in what equipment people use, or what lens was used or whatever else, this way I hoped to kill off all the message I had previously asking me what lens, what aperture, what camera settings and whatever else. Granted, clients probably wont even know or care so I concur, it will go.

And John:

Thanks for the comments. It seems that the splash page is not liked by photographers but I do think it serves a purpose in my setting and nobody other than photographers has even mentioned it. I did try to minimise it's impact though and not make it too laborious, not have windows opening everywhere and tried to make it as painfree as possible, but, I will bare what you have said in mind but for the moment, I like it enough to keep it.

Again, thank you for actually taking the time to write what you did.

Lose the splash page. There is no value to it whatsoever. If I didn't want to enter your site, I wouldn't have gone to it. Don't give someone a reason to not look at your site. Your site should open up with a dazzling image that makes the viewer say "Wow" and want to see some more "wow." Right now, your splash page serves no purpose other than to bore me and tempt me to leave.

You should also reduce the photo size a tad to allow for quicker loading time. Another bugger for most people is waiting for images to load, thus another reason to sign off your site and find stimulation elsewhere.

This information comes from dozens of ad agencies I do business with and for whom we design sites for. Right now, I would have a hard time going back to your site because it's a little time consuming and is not an effortless tour of your work.

Your site has a nice, clean interface and your work as a photog is pretty strong. Just don't give someone a reason to say "no."

john660 wrote:
Tez, I'd agree and disagree with Alan on a couple of points:

3. this is where I disagree...keywords in your meta tags have no bearing on anything. In fact, you're wasting time by putting them in. That's old school, search engines no longer pay attention to meta keywords (read up on Search Engine Optimization for more info).

John


You're quite right John about the keyword meta tags. It just doesn't make a difference as the major search engines ignore them. In the past, it could get you into trouble,

However, the title meta tag is very important. Your title should contain keywords relevant to (and repeated in the content) of any particular page of your site. The description tag is important, not so much for keywords, but because Google sometimes uses this text for the snippet in the search engine results page.

okie doke.

Splash page is gone. My initial reasoning for having it was to funnel traffic where it needed to go, so people checking my blog could go to the blog, clients buying prints could skip straight to that... but now I see that I probably want people on my page and to go through it.

As for the picture sizes- a lot of them are around the 200k mark and I find myself saving files at 20 quality with the save for web, amazingly this doesn't screw them up too much and on my mediocre connection everything loads fast and better than I expected.

I totally understand not giving people a reason to say no, and the more obstacles I put in the way, the higher the likelihood is of that happening. I half think it's the emperor's new clothes as my last site had none of the capabilities of my new one but I understand where you all are coming from.

Again I want to thank you for the advice/insights and for taking the time to help me out. I swallowed my pride long ago about this stuff and realise that my viewpoint is not necessarily the best one there is.

I also changed the bio a little bit... nothing fancy, but adopted some of Alan's suggestions and grafted them in there.

So, thus far:

removed the splash page
supplied a link to the blog on the main page
edited the bio to make it more confident/more 'to-the-point'

Thank you.

Nice site, I hope you removed the bolt in the rifle in the model's hands. "Unloaded" isn't good enough if it's a real rifle.

(Sorry, being one of the many responsible gunowners out there I cringe seeing possibly unsafe handling of firearms.)

yep the bolt was removed and kept back at the owner's place. No ammo, no bolt, no nothing.

It was the first time I'd met the model so I didn't want a weapon lying around that could fire. She also brought along her boyfriend who was a solider and completely enamored with the rifle.

SO, it was as safe as i could make it. And thanks for saying about the site.

Tez, WAY better opening...now I go to your site and the first thing I see (at least on my monitor) is a big juicy image that makes me want to explore further. My only wish now is that the menu would pop up a bit more quickly, but that's haggling at this stage.

@Alan: absolutely dead-on...the title and description meta tags do still have importance in the SEO scheme of things, as do keywords in the actual pages that relate to those particular meta tags (particularly the title tag).

Hey John,

Thanks for that

It was basically an exercise to trim the fat from the site and make it simpler and cleaner. I have had a lot of great feedback from friends and randoms so I guess I'm doing something right.

I'm still struggling with the search engine crapola though because a search for 'tez mercer photography' is my Model Mayhem and Facebook pages ahead of my actual site which isn't the best thing in the world... back to the drawing board.

When the COMMERCIAL button flips over (mouse hover) it is unreadable. All the others are able to be read when flipped.

Drew_Persson wrote:
Nice site, I hope you removed the bolt in the rifle in the model's hands. "Unloaded" isn't good enough if it's a real rifle.

(Sorry, being one of the many responsible gunowners out there I cringe seeing possibly unsafe handling of firearms.)


My personal opinion is that removing the bolt is a bit much if you have any experience with firearms at all. If the gun is not loaded, and verified to be not loaded by someone that knows what they are doing, then removing the bolt is unnecessary. I guess it is all a matter of the comfort level of those invovled.

If worried about being found in Google Flash would not be the best option. I suggest you go to Google and open an account. ( not ad words account ) Next use the tools to see if Google can index all of you pages. Most likely it will have problems. After that make a sitemap. All in the Google documentation and try again.
Keywords, Title and description. No one has the guidelines that are used by the search engines. Everyone just looks at the pages that do well and guess. I would have a good matching title, keyword and description. The title and description should be what is shown if found in a search to get someone interested enough to click your site.

Your navigation is a little too inconspicuous for my tastes. I am browsing on a 1600/1200 resolution and so the photos take up most of the frame -- the navigation text is almost unreadable.

You also have thumbnails, but again, they are too small to even be useful. I know thumbnails are "in" and obviously a well-known practice, but they are not very effective if you cannot even see what is happening in the thumbnail. They basically become a waste of space and you are better off just having back-and-forth navigational arrows or even numbered boxes. At least that is my opinion, I'm sure others will disagree. A good rule of thumb for me is that if I have to make the thumbnails on my pages smaller than Flickr.com thumbnails (75 x 75), then they are probably too small for most people. Your thumbnails are about 45 x 45, which is too small.

If you are unsure whether you need navigational thumbnails, or if you think arrows are too vague an indicator that there are photos before and after the current photo, then test your page on a novice or ordinary internet user (such as your grandmother). If she cannot navigate the page with your current design, then it's probably too complicated. I can tell from your portfolio that your images are designed to attract a wide range of potential clients. You have to make sure those clients can effectively navigate your page regardless of what their age, experience or background is in using the internet (it would be different if, say, all your clients were advertising agencies because those people are accustomed to browsing pages with a lot of wild and creative navigation styles).

I'm also having a hard time distinguishing between your people, places and commercial work. If I looked at a batch of your commercial photos and they were not labeled as "commercial", I would not even know they were intended for commercial use. Maybe you could include some tearsheets in that section.

You've got images in the "travel" section that seem like they belong in the "places" section and vice-versa. And each section contains images of people even though you have a dedicated "people" section. You need to more carefully choose which images go in what categories.

Your site also seems a little cramped (even though most of the screen is taken up by the image). You need to increase the margins and padding in your graphical elements to bring the viewer's eyes closer to the center of the screen instead of being focused at the edges. Here is a good article you should check out about effectively using white space in your designs:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whitespace


A few other minor things --

No need to put "Contact Page". Rename to "Contact" or "Contact Me". Also, no need to have a "clear" button on your contact form. "Clear" buttons are outdated. Accessibility studies have shown "Clear" buttons to basically have no value.

On the plus side, I like your large photos. It gives a very dramatic and striking effect.

Strong work, nice site. I found it loaded a little slow, it could be my computer. I also am wondering why you have a pricing section, especially since you are saying you will get back to people with prices. Overall, very nice.

Mark

in general nice,
but slow

and

no flash/java free content.

when some website is that dead slow i usually give up. website is not a feature movie, it is presentation. It should present and not rob you of your time.
But on other side. It is not worse than most other photog's sites.