It is totally unnecessary, and nothing irritates me more than someone telling me I must download some company's 'latest' new program just to view their site. Like I'm gonna waste my time on that arrogant SOB.
There are good examples of sites around here that are simple, effective, and work for EVERYONE. 'donrisi' is a good example of how even a pbase account can make for a nice layout. Simple, well thought, and effective....
Thanks everyone for sharing. Chris, your site rocks, so do the photos! Jason, Rey, nice work. Don, awesome, super simple navigation. I love looking at simple elegant sites but I totally think flash sites are really cool also. Giving your users an option of flash or non-flash is always a nice tourch.
I like the Olivia Graham as well as the Chris Benny site. Feel free to check out mine but the graphics on it are not near as good as what Chris or Olivia have put together ... maybe time for another rewrite!
On Susan's site, I like a lot of things about it (including the graphics) but it would navigate better, in my opinion, if some of the photos were hot-links, etc.
I think websites could be more in the mold of pbase, without the stupid front page and dumb flash navigation. If you're professional, you just make the images 640x480. http://www.pbase.com/pierresphotography
I think the key to keeping visitors at your site a long time is a simple navigation structure that requires no thinking. The key to repeat web visitors is good photography. I took a few classes in college on web usability and interface design which helped a lot when figuring out how I wanted to tier my content, make it scalable and finally design the nav. I'm still working on the photograhy aspect every day..
I designed it statically to help the search engines index the heck out of it but I'm hoping to eventually make it all dynamic with a db backend which would be a lot less time consuming when updating.
I think you have an excellent website, masont, but the thumbnails are too small, and together they do not form a complete rectangle - maybe you can always keep the same number of thumbnails available? That is the first problem for me.
The second problem for me, is that your stuff is too much centered - I think you should move it over to the left as far as is pleasing to the human eye.
Thanks for the comments and yeah that thumbnail size issue has always been an issue on my mind. You have to have trade offs with the number of thumbs available to preview vs. their size. As for having the layout centered, well that was a preference based on the way I have the left side of the nav open and felt that it would look wrong if the nav was pushed up against the side without some sort of frame buffering the words. The only thing I don't like about pbase and using it as your sole portfolio site is that the search engines don't index it very well. Most of my sales have come from people finding my site through the search engines. That and also pbase has no way (that I know of) to track your visitors, minus page view counts.
Well, id say not mine either, mostly because its not finished, and im doing everything myself. The photo galleries are there, and the basic structure is there for the most part though, so feel free to take a look!
I think its smart to have a combination of flash and traditional html elements. That way your website is searchable through Google, etc, while still gaining the benefits of flash.
I am open to any comments! (and yes, that is me on the about page)
Rey (http://www.reyvilla.com/), i like your photos, and props on the use of Simplviewer! Although i think youve overdone it JUST a tad... thats a LOT of photos to sift through! Maybe break it up into sections, although that requires more html work. I was doing the same thing with simpleviewer until i realized i had to bite the bullet and build a full-blown website around the use of simpleviewer (granted a heavily modified version of it!)
Although i think youve overdone it JUST a tad... thats a LOT of photos to sift through! Maybe break it up into sections, although that requires more html work. I was doing the same thing with simpleviewer until i realized i had to bite the bullet and build a full-blown website around the use of simpleviewer (granted a heavily modified version of it!)