New web site

I am fairly new to the business and am trying to get comments and exposure for my web site. I am interesed in any feed back that I could get from people that have been doing this for a while and if you like the website, please pass it on to your friends.

www.jhphotoart.com

Thanks,
JHPHOTOART

My thoughts

I thought your site was easy to navigate and your work very nicely presented and professional.

My personal preference is to have the sites load very quickly - yours takes time to load but at least it tells you that it is loading.

The very bad in my opinion is the logo of your webdesigner in big blue letters that detracts from the beauty. If it were static, it would not be bad, but I had a hard time seeing the beauty because that logo was screaming at me.

Hi Jason,

Welcome to OPF. I visited your website and liked some of the pictures, especially the flower in B&W b ut was taken back by the flash.

Today, we are used to fast Razzmatazz of MTV and other video advertizing and your website crawls and is counterproductive. You will have lost most people as we don't have patience to wait for non-happenning things to go by. The personal design fetishes of the web planner should be removed. You work is what will sell itself.

Clean is what is needed and very fast and obvious.

So make the images smaller so they will load faster and then keep loading things in the background so you can cut down waiting. There is no point in having a large image if that is not to the viewers taste. They might look at one image or two and leave, but the one they would love could be image number 4 or 9. How can you get them to stay that long.

Well you need to make it obvious to the viewer that you are not messing with them and you deliver immediately. So have a small icon and as they mouse over the icon, your pictures must appear instantly. Then they feel generously and will look at your next album.

There's a lot I like about your work, but I don't give false praise.

Also keep the text going with the selling of your pictures, simple and smaller so it's the picture that's important not the details of the purchase.

I hope you prefer my frank style. If not, let me know.

Thanks for joining us,

Asher

Hi Jason,

I see no purpose for your site. If it is for your local customers, then it is too slow, if it is for world wide sales, it is too slow. If it is to support your local 'web designer' - an oxymoron - then their site is even slower.

What you are trying to do, is not easy, nor is it cheap to set up. Your local web design guys are possibly not the guys to help you. If your aim is to sell photos, then you may be better off doing it by some other method.

Best wishes,

Ray

Hi Jason,

I hope you don't think we are a bunch of mean-sprited photographers who dismiss someone's hard work as a matter of fact. Well the opposite. Each of these comments represents a pretty good attempt be people who have the same needs to get the word out and have experience on what works for them and what doesn't. So please take this harsh ctiticism of the packaging and presentation of your work as being a failing grade for your web sesigner and not your work.

We do have great web designs in some of the galleries of OPFers here. It might be that a photographer could be avaliable for you or suggest someone with your budget range to showcase your work.

Please don't take the wrong reaction as we are trying to be honest and helpful.

Asher

Update on the Web site

I really appreciate all of the feed back that i have received. We have taken a lot of the suggestions that were posted here on this forum and implemented them on the website. Please go back and take another look i think you will like what you see.

www.jhphotoart.com

Thanks,
JHPHOTOART

Hi Jason,

Thanks for being patient with us and trying suggestions. It appears cleaner. Congrats.

I would again ask you to consider three things.

1. Remove need to click on Icons to load image. Make it a mouse-over!

2. Use a smaller image so that it will appear instantly. Unless it's your mother, few people will wait for pictures to appear. Check other sites for speed of loading. Is there something your provider can improve upon.

3. continue this process of gradual improvement and keep your designer controlled.

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

I would again ask you to consider three things.

1. Remove need to click on Icons to load image. Make it a mouse-over!
Asher

Click to expand...

Asher, I agree with You on your other points but could not disagree with You more on your recommendation to use mouse-over. A mouse-over change is counter productive. It forces you to have to navigate around objects when moving your mouse to use it for other things on your computer. Nothing pisses off someone more than to have what you are looking at or reading change because you happened to to move your mouse. As it is when I use your forum site I have to move my mouse many times because the stupid popups about what ever my mouse happens to be over cover up what I am trying to read particularly on the Recent Posts page. The mouse is a pointing device only and should never ever and I repeat NEVER EVER activate anything without a Click or keyboard action!

I couldn't agree more with Will. Mouseover image navigation is a really bad idea that too many people think is "cool." I think mouseover pulldown menus on websites are bad enough (especially since they don't work right half of the time, usually getting stuck in the open position and covering something up). Mouseover image navigation is even worse, and can be particularly horrible when designers pick ultra-tiny numbers as mouse targets, meaning that the slightest movement causes a flurry of image-switching activity.

Will Thompson said:

Asher, I agree with You on your other points but could not disagree with You more on your recommendation to use mouse-over. A mouse-over change is counter productive. It forces you to have to navigate around objects when moving your mouse to use it for other things on your computer. Nothing pisses off someone more than to have what you are looking at or reading change because you happened to to move your mouse. As it is when I use your forum site I have to move my mouse many times because the stupid popups about what ever my mouse happens to be over cover up what I am trying to read particularly on the Recent Posts page. The mouse is a pointing device only and should never ever and I repeat NEVER EVER activate anything without a Click or keyboard action!

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Hi Will,

Often your words are wise, here not! LOL!!!

I think this is likely a Mac thing in that you have Safari options set to show information on everything! Switch this off. I have no such mouse over popups on any of 10 Macs!! So it is a non-issue.

The practical point for web galleries is this. You have about 1/3 of a second at most to grab someones attention. If it takes that time to load a picture, unless it is stunning or what you are looking for you will likely exit the website altogether!

Mouse-overs are the smaprtes interface when used well. They work like this. One has, as Jason has on his galleries, a column or block of timy thumnails with the pictures to be shown.

To see a large version of any of these on Jason's site, one has to actually mouse click on that thumbnail icon. This means that for 20 images the hand and wrist has the work of 20 click movements. This causes wrist and finger damage!

Mouse-over obliterates this . When the curser is over an image, the picture in question is loaded in a large frame immediately!

In some sites, visual and auditory clues are given by having the icon highlight and even a click is heard, without needing to click!

Now for the few who feel that such non-click choices are annoying and need the click choice, then one could have that as an option in "Peferences" if enough people want that.

Asher

Josh Liechty said:

I couldn't agree more with Will. Mouseover image navigation is a really bad idea that too many people think is "cool." I think mouseover pulldown menus on websites are bad enough (especially since they don't work right half of the time, usually getting stuck in the open position and covering something up). Mouseover image navigation is even worse, and can be particularly horrible when designers pick ultra-tiny numbers as mouse targets, meaning that the slightest movement causes a flurry of image-switching activity.

Click to expand...

Josh,

I agree with you about mouse-over pulldown menus that don't work right and the tiny integer settings can make things fly all over the place.

However, done correctly, mouse-over's for blocks of icons for showing images is the most efficient inerface apart from "Next" and Previous".

Asher

Mouse clicks are cheap (er, easy). Ever since the mouse was introduced, interfaces that use it have always based actions happening upon mouse clicks, not mouse pass-overs. There is much to be said for following standard conventions, even if some other way may be "cooler" or may seem like "less work" - when in reality it's more work for the user to figure out how in the heck they're supposed to use the interface (hopefully not longer than their attention span).

It's kind of like hyperlinks; some sites think that they'll be "unique" by not using underlines on hyperlinks. This is incredibly stupid because one has to mouse over the entire page to find any links, and such design decisions cause nothing but frustration. Mouse-over thumbnails are not quite as bad, but they're still a source of great frustration, especially on slower internet connections (even on DSL I get annoyed at the 3 to 5 seconds that it takes such galleries to load each image).

I'm not a professional designer, and more of my education on web site design has come from the area of usability than from the area of artistic design. Since a non-insignificant number of professional photographers' websites seem to lean heavily on flashy design an animation (often to the point of nausea) without regard to usability, I guess my opinion is probably out of place here.

Josh,

I don't know whether or not your reamarks were addressed to me?

Mouse clicks by convention, such as going to a new page or checking a box for preferences defines things and so has become part of the way of doing things.

I do not like flashy jazzed up websites.

I prefer architectural websites with clean interfaces that are so simple and obvious. Only then, when there is a defined purpose, do mouse-overs become far more efficient and user firendly. Here, we want to give the user a fast choice experience. When pictures load instantly as one moves over a block of thumbs then one can present more pictures with little wrist effort. Repetitive wrist movement in clicking is thus avoided and exploring your library of images becomes a cinch.

Asher

I'm not going to say any more on this; I think my opinion on usability is clear enough, and I won't dislike anyone who disagrees. By the way, I was intending to quote your comments, but I used the quick reply and must have messed something up.

Josh,

Mostly I have no disagreement with you on this. Just for perfectly designed situations of blocks of images I find the mouse-over an advantage and a way of reducing wrist strain. Will Thompson literally gets angry when things pop up unexpectedly as one accidentally triggers a mouse-over. This is bad design!

Probably there should be a way to switch mouse over off

Asher

Two Examples for Choosing Images Click v Mouse over, you decide!

My interest in this choice is practical. I look at many galleries studying and enjoying images. My wrists and fingers get tired from the constant mouse clicks needed to navigate.

I thought I'd show you an example of what I thought was a great and appropriate use of mouse-over to rapidly make available samples of your images.

Here's one example of mouse-overfrom Leonardo Barreto , who I congratulate for the beauty and easy interface.

Of course, one can have a click interferface instead, if you don't mind the extra work and wait. This one is also very handsome from Australia, the freelance photographer, Jon Love.

Just thought that some well thought out examples of each would illustrate the relative advantages of each to your own work style. Note that the latter example could just was well be converted to mouse over if there was a user option to do so.

Asher

To play the annoying devil's advocate, I'll point out that in your first example, Asher, he uses the mouse-over only on the home page to show examples from the galleries (I've done that myself on one site design, which is no longer in use for unrelated reasons). Leonardo's galleries themselves are click-to-open, like those on the second site. With that said, I'd much rather have mouse over navigation with properly large and uncropped thumbnails like Leonardo's than click-to-open with the terribly tiny partial thumbnails that Jon uses.

Thank you Asher, I'm reading the kind review you posted about my web site. I learned some time ago to use Macromedia's (Adobe is now the proud owner of the fantastic Macromedia, so now all the cookies are in the same jar) Dreamweaver, a fantastic program that is a bit difficult at the start, but very easy for maintenance and uploading there after. I had a look at Flash (also from Macromedia) and decided that I didn't wanted to go chase that learning curve, and on the other side there was the Flash thing.

The thing about Flash

I call Flash sites "Singing and Dancing" web sites. It is good if you have a good song and choreography that want to make people stop their internet experience to see and here. But if you don't, you may get your traffic annoyed, impatient and underwhelmed.

So I decided that my website had to do some dancing -- no singing, which is something public REALY hates -- and basically respond fast and in an elegant way to what people really want that is: to come in get info. and go. May be that's why it is called "surfing". Imagine stopping a surfer at the hight of a wave and say: WAIT; LOADING.

Of course my case is not every case, If you are a wedding photographer and have a small business and go against specific competition, then you may want to go with a smart well conceived Flash opening.

I think that doing a web site with no Flash is like going organic. The good thing is that It is cheaper and easier on the user to go that way.

What I used is something called "behaviors" and "rolovers". You "draw layers" --that have nothing to do with Photoshop layers -- that "on mouse over" change a set image in a layer that exists somewhere in the page. I took me some time to make the images go back to the original state "on mouse out", but it is just a matter of trial and error. I think that a professional web designer can do this very cheaply.

But thank you again for paying attention to my humble "organic" site.

Asher Kelman said:

My interest in this choice is practical. I look at many galleries studying and enjoying images. My wrists and fingers get tired from the constant mouse clicks needed to navigate.

I thought I'd show you an example of what I thought was a great and appropriate use of mouse-over to rapidly make available samples of your images.

Here's one example of mouse-overfrom Leonardo Barreto , who I congratulate for the beauty and easy interface.

Of course, one can have a click interferface instead, if you don't mind the extra work and wait. This one is also very handsome from Australia, the freelance photographer, Jon Love.

Just thought that some well thought out examples of each would illustrate the relative advantages of each to your own work style. Note that the latter example could just was well be converted to mouse over if there was a user option to do so.

Asher

Click to expand...