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My new website.

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Darren,

Just had a quick butchers, looks good and i like the layout. Easy to find things....plus no heavy flash players (heaven). Nice work.
 
Love it, clean and simple,
No BS ranting about how your granny gave you your first camera at age 6 etc....

looks great in safari and ie8. Takes bout 5 seconds for pages to load on my 8 Mb connection.

Once again Great job

Glen
--
Olympus 4/3
 
Nice and clean design, which I like.
Some musings, below take from them what you want. They are all just my opinions.

Browser: Firefox 3.5.8 using gecko 1.9.1.8 20100202
OS: Windows XP 64
JS enabled, Adblock enabled, Firebug enabled
Screen size: 1280x1024, browser client area: 1255x866
Monitor: TFT, uncalibrated

Front page
  • The front page has some very nice images on them, but it'd be nice if they linked through to bigger versions (possibly with using Lightbox)
  • Have you considered making that front-page mosaic generate randomly?
  • I like how it exactly fills the screen heightwise on my screen (should do the same on more common 1680x1050 screens).
  • "stuff" is maybe not the greatest word to use. It implies nonchalance and indifference. It's just, you know, stuff.
people
  • On my screen there's quite a bit of empty space on the right. I imagine this will be an even bigger gap on the widescreen monitors that are popular these days. This is exarberated by the banner images not extending as far as the header of the page.
  • The text description between the images breaks the flow for me, making the page seems more like a collection of links than a whole. Not sure how to solve this but I'd experiment with putting the text slightly closer to the images and maybe playing around with the font some (using a medium gray and bold font for example).
  • I like how the images go medium-dark-light
Galleries
  • Well, I'm not too fond about flash galleries myself, as it stops people from linking through (though that can be solved with some javascript and actionscript tricks) but I doubt you'll change that :)
  • Scroll speed on the thumbnail collumn seems good. Sometimes these systems can make it hard to select an image you want, but yours seems well balanced.
  • If the bar is scrolled down and you then click the "next" or "previous" arrows the bar will reposition to show the thumbnail of the selected image. While this is fine, it does so rather abruptly, which startled me a bit.
Sets
  • While this page seems better balanced than the people page, it also feels more mundane.
Hope these comments help any, feel free to ignore.
--
Mithandir,
Eternal Amateur
http://www.shooting43.com/

Unless stated differently, any image I post is licensed under CC-by-nc
 
I like it.

I only looked at a few sections, but your front page (composite pics) is excellent, and the choice of pics for 'people' is great too. I did try to click on the pictures in the composite, maybe you should link each to a bigger example ...

'Stuff' loaded a bit clumsily but no big deal.

Thank you for allowing your page to work without me activating the flash plugins!! Now that's progress.

P.S. -sigh- Now that Mithandir is giving you proper feedback I guess I should do the thing ; WinXP-Pro, Opera9.62, plugins off, blocked popups, java on.
(Friends don't let friends use explorer)
 
  • You might want to add a favicon.
  • None of your images have alt or title attributes. Sure, as a photography site you're not catering for the visually impaired, but search engines like them
Front page speed profile on my work connection:



--
Mithandir,
Eternal Amateur
http://www.shooting43.com/

Unless stated differently, any image I post is licensed under CC-by-nc
 
Really like it, loads fine too.

If you don't mind me asking, where are those shots taken of the guys in those crazy flying suits? They're really good, those guys are mad!
 
Thanks for all the comments and feedback so far guys.

I've still got some "tweaking" of the site to do but I don't expect it will change too much. More minor refinements than major changes.

I'll certainly take all your input on board.

Many thanks.

Darren

--
http://www.darrenbirkin.com
Olympus and Canon digital cameras. Mamiya film cameras.
 
Hi Darren,

It's nice and clean and simple, with a good layout and photos large enough to enjoy.

Two remarks: it would be nice if the photos on the homepage were linked to larger versions, and the title "stuff" doesn't sound very inviting - though I did click and look at the photos, which definitely deserve a nicer set name IMO. Something like "Impressions" or "Moments in time"...

Cheers
Christa

PS. I'm using Firefox 3.0.5 without pop-ups.
--
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch_cnb/
 
Darren_Birkin said:
Thanks for all the comments and feedback so far guys.

I've still got some "tweaking" of the site to do but I don't expect it will change too much. More minor refinements than major changes.

I'll certainly take all your input on board.

Many thanks.

Darren

--
http://www.darrenbirkin.com
Olympus and Canon digital cameras. Mamiya film cameras.
Click to expand...
Go along with the comments so far but would also add that you need to change the 'about' page to 'biog' and improve the wording a lot. I can't work out from that if your a keen amateur or or a pro? It does not sell you enough. I want to know as a client who you have worked with recently and where you works has been published. Projects have worked on. If you studied photography, where? All that kind of stuff.

Copyright warning is too friendly! :-)

The navigation on the thumbnails is sometimes slow to react. They start scrolling faster and then it can be fun and games trying to get it to slow down again and even stop it. Can you do anything about that in the settings? Would be nice if the pages auto resized for the screen resolution/size if at all possible. White background works well but an image now and again suffers when it appears darker than it really is because of the contrast difference.
 
Darren_Birkin said:
Morning all.
Click to expand...
Hi Darren,
Darren_Birkin said:
content
Click to expand...
Fantastic. You're obviously a gifted photographer; congrats to that and thanks for sharing. Looked at the "people" content only, and even there not all of the nudes since I'm at work, but still - wow! Saw only the front picture of other sections so far.
Darren_Birkin said:
layout
Click to expand...
Very nice, as others said already. No flash is a big thumbs up! I also like the clean and professional look of it all.
Darren_Birkin said:
navigation
Click to expand...
Cool here - I'm using FF 3.5.8 with Adblock Plus on Win XP at work; if you're interested I will try it at home this evening, using Linux 2.6 (Debian) and an older version of Firefox (which Debian rebrands to "Iceweasel"). I can give more feedback then.
Darren_Birkin said:
speed of loading
Click to expand...
Nice from here (big blue three letter company in the middle of Germany, connected via AT&T AFAIK). I'll try from home later, where I have a 20Mb/s cable connection.
Darren_Birkin said:
etc ?
Click to expand...
You chose the 19$ Viewbook "Pro" plan? Hmmm. They say you can upload 5,000 images, but don't get too specific whether they mean 2MP or 60MP. Also, is that a "normal" managed account, where you don't have to deal with servers yourself? Do you even know if that is a virtual web server or a whole virtual machine?

Well I guess I could find out the answers to all that myself - it's kind of OT here...

Again, thanks for sharing - I'll definitely bookmark this at home.

cheers,
Wolfgang
(see my blog at http://wolfgang.lonien.de/ if you're interested)
 
Hi

Thanks again for the input. Very valuable and helpful.

Yes, it's setup using a viewbook pro account. So to an extent I'm limited in some of the formatting and layout to what can be done within the limits of viewbooks templates. I doubt I'll ever need to have 5000 images online but there are some benefits of the pro account that I wanted such as being able to have password protected galleries.

I don't know if it it's a real or virtual server but my guess would be the latter. Not that it really makes much difference to me.

Cheers

Darren
--
http://www.darrenbirkin.com
Olympus and Canon digital cameras. Mamiya film cameras.
 
The fastest loading professional photo Web site I have seen, great job.

I love the flesh !
--
'Photos are what remain when the memories are forgotten' - Angular Mo.
 
superb effort

very fast loading, mind you im on a hugely fast connection. (no delay in seeing content load, little delay in gallery loading)

great impact

if i had more time id be looking through the whole site

--
if you can imagine the picture, then do all you can to make it
 
Nice looking website and really excellent photographic work! Everything seems to work smoothly and images load very fast. My only nit -- and it's just a personal thing -- is that I hate those 'floating' thumbnail strips. I find it irritating to have to chase a thumbnail to click on it! :-)

God Bless,
Greg
http://www.imagismphotos.com
http://www.mccroskery.zenfolio.com
 
I think you've covered all the fundamentals for a great website: intuitive navigation, easy loading, excellent images (if a bit too-stocky, IMHO), and minimal well-articulated text. Personally, I prefer a background tha'st darker, definitely not paper-base white.

But that's just my opinion (and lazy...I prefer templates with a drag-and-drop option)
--
dodge
 
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