Please review website and browser check in Windows.

[al olson]

The site has an elegant feel and your friend's photos are superb. I agree that the main logo could be a little smaller.

I use Mozilla Firefox with the standard sidebar at the left of the screen. Thus not all of the images fit completely in the view space. Shifting everything to the left a few pixels would eliminate horizontal scrolling.

These are just picky things. Overall the site looks great!

[JohnnyV]

I'd make the logo smaller out of personal taste and because of the fact that some of us use laptops.

When I am looking at a Simple viewer gallery I have no obvious way of getting back to the home page or to see other galleries unless I use the browser's back button....

Oh I see... I had to scroll down.

Put the nav at the top, it is simple and sparse enough.

Better yet, show me how to get to the next gallery -- from Food to Drink -- without making me backstep.

Thanks!

I'm still kinda figuring the best approach to navigate to the other galleries without going to the home page. Was a pain just hacking the Simple Viewer Gallery files to work with more than one gallery. The galleries were generated in Lightroom 2 beta if anyone is interested.

Good luck with the search engines with that type of site ;-p

Funny, I had the test site on my .mac account space and within a week it was on top of Google.

It went live about two months ago and now Google can't even find it....zero results. The site has meta descriptions and keywords. Not sure what else to do to have it show up anywhere on Google.

Any advice?

Thanks!

[JohnnyV]

Looks fine on Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1

The logo design is nice looking, but grabs my eye before the photos do. I would change the size a bit smaller. Also the contact page is begging to be spammed. I solved this problem on my site after months of frustration by finally spending a little for the superb forms program: MachForm.

Overall, your friend should be very pleased!

Best,
Darr

Thanks for all the constructive feedback!

This site could use a contact forms page for sure. Is there a freeware version anywhere....or free scripts?


Thanks!

[Rob Champagne]

http://www.hotscripts.com/

[gdmcclintock]

I would remove the DeSanto at the top. I stopped looking at the website when I realized the photographer's name was on top of every page.

[dneuman]

Looks fine in Opera; looks like a Lightroom generated web page. The Logo will distrort (getting jagged) if one views in larger than 100% view however.
Best,
Dan (New member)

[JohnnyV]

I would remove the DeSanto at the top. I stopped looking at the website when I realized the photographer's name was on top of every page.

What would you suggest for the top of each page?

[JohnnyV]

Looks fine in Opera; looks like a Lightroom generated web page. The Logo will distrort (getting jagged) if one views in larger than 100% view however.
Best,
Dan (New member)

Thanks for taking a look in Opera...I totally forgot about that browser.

Yep the web galleries are generated in Lightroom with the stock SimpleViewer plug-in. It's a little tricky having more than one SimpleViewer gallery on a website as all the files SV creates are named the same. I had to go into each xml file with a text editor to rename certain items...like paths to specific gallery images.

I really like the SV galleries... If interested here's instructions on how to modify the gallery files:

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/s..._instruct.html
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/s...r/options.html

More than enough controls to keep everyone busy!

I haven't had much time to work on the website. I'd like to make Desanto logo a touch smaller and add contact forms when I have a couple hours to myself.

Best

John

[jshanesy]

Everything also works perfectly on Firefox 3.0.1 running on Linux (Ubuntu 8.0.4). Really nice website. The initial splash makes you want to see more and only 1 click takes you to pictures. It should get him a lot of business.

[willwilson]

John,

Great site, Great images. I especially like the eggs and whisk shot. I know how hard it is to get even the simplest of website up and running, considering I just got done overhauling my own. I would like to suggest a few things:

1) Jalbum (Jalbum.net) similar to picasa great for web galleries.

2) css - you really have to move away from tables for layout. I was initially very resistant to switching over away from table layout, but css is really great once you get the hang of it. Google css for tutorials, this is a great starter page for layouts: http://www.glish.com/css/

Also, style code, like what is in your header file could be moved to a single linked style sheet. Then all you have to do to change a font or link color is modifiy code on that one page. Look at the source on my page for an example.


3) Logo Size: Your call. I can go either way. Big, its very memorable. Smaller would allow you to focus your visitors on your photos more. You have to remember about screen resolution too. I think its fine at 1280x1024 (what I run), but at 1024x768 (~40% of users) its too big and you have to scroll.

4) Thumbnail Size: at 1280x1024 your thumbnails are too small for easy viewing. Have you thought about Banana Album (bananalbum.com). That's what I use, $39.00 for a license, which you don't need. It is easy to customize with Jablum and no hacking required, just insert it into your page with an iframe.

Good Luck,

-=Will