New Website

[kev curry]

Maybe I'm missing the point but why would anyone want to give ''notice to the minute details of often overlooked spaces'' like traffic cones and power lines and garbage bins etc etc? I can put these things into an environmental, political and social context but I don't think thats your intention here. I just don't get it.
People routinely filter out the monotony of everyday life for good reason, its dull and monotonous as your images testify.

[Jim Michael]

The images scroll OK on my Kindle Fire but they are not centered.

You didn't quite convince me in your second paragraph. Are these banal images or temporal epiphanies? You reference Barthes, but you don't really give your opinion and rationale, and there seems to be a bit of handwaving from Barthes to photography as hallucination. But I may be too analytical.

Repetition seems to be a theme in your show. The van with the stickers seems to reflect the Freud reference and some type of compulsive behavior on the part of the owner. Fun stuff.

[ROL]

I'm trying to promote the site and also get some feedback on the site's functionality. What do you think?

I'm going to take another tack here, based solely on what you've asked for – functionality, not "artistic" style or content:

• The site is quite slow to load on my DSL. I almost bailed. The pix that come in, though fuzzily visible, are not fully resolved for at least a minute. It would be inadvisable to show a photograph until totally loaded, otherwise the impression is left that your photos are technically unfocused, particularly if the user won't wait or doesn't realize they are still loading, which is exactly what I thought. No pic need be larger than 72 DPI.
  
• The site dumps the user inexplicably (other than for "style" sake) into the middle of a lengthy scroll screen. Divy up the the work up into logical, manageable (linked) chunks. Designing a brief home page with a representative image and/or statement, slideshow, or thumbnail gallery feature may be a more productive way to greet your users.
  
• You can test your own site with various browsers. Just download and install them on your computer.

Regarding promotion:

Given the above, IMO the site has a very amateurish, unfocused, decade old look and feel – unless that was your intention, then my apologies – mission accomplished! You may or may not find some other useful Webmarketing info here.

[patapuss]

Maybe I'm missing the point but why would anyone want to give ''notice to the minute details of often overlooked spaces'' like traffic cones and power lines and garbage bins etc etc? I can put these things into an environmental, political and social context but I don't think thats your intention here. I just don't get it.
People routinely filter out the monotony of everyday life for good reason, its dull and monotonous as your images testify.

I don't mean to be rude, but your comment is unnecessary. My original post explicitly asks for input on the site's functionality. I am not interested in critique based on artistic value. If you feel so strongly against the work, why waste your time bashing it?

[atlcruiser]

I sort of like the pictures....the presentation bothers me. I cant really figure out the plan for the web page. It starts in the iddle.... I am on IE and the images will not center on the screen so to see them I need to scroll. The text overlays some of the images....

I could see this as part of an installation in a gallery but it is difficult to navigate as a web page. Am I getting information or being drawn into a project?

[r.e.]

patapuss,

I gather that you hired a professional designer to do this - http://dgivens.com - and I'm having trouble squaring that with my reaction.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I've tried the site on an iPad and a MacBook Air and it comes off as chaotic. Even on a straight technical level, when I loaded the site on my MacBook Air, I initially wondered whether the images were all out of focus (see ROL's comment to the same effect). Sorry that I can't be more positive, but I think that you need to have a serious discussion with the gentleman who designed this.

[Jim Michael]

Sort of looks like an image rendering issue on my Mac, doesn't do it on the little Fire reader.

[RickV]

In the context of your artist statement, the functionality is appropriate and works well.
The need to scroll the oversize images conforms to your premise of "confronting the viewer with a fragment of what exists on the periphery of perception, simultaneously inviting its audience to look beyond the bustle of everyday life". My only functional suggestion would be to get rid of the white background and deploy a background to your images which enhances the delivery of your statement. Whilst my last sentence may smack of "critique based on artistic value", I feel that functionality and artistic value share a sensitive dependence upon one another.

[kev curry]

I don't mean to be rude, but your comment is unnecessary. My original post explicitly asks for input on the site's functionality. I am not interested in critique based on artistic value. If you feel so strongly against the work, why waste your time bashing it?

With your statement in mind; that your primary interest lies in technical functionality over artistic content is puzzling to someone like me.
Maybe I'm just too underdeveloped to have access to such work. No matter.

[sully75]

I don't mean to be rude, but your comment is unnecessary. My original post explicitly asks for input on the site's functionality. I am not interested in critique based on artistic value. If you feel so strongly against the work, why waste your time bashing it?

It is rude, dude. Hard to seperate the "artistic" issues from the design issues here. You put it out there for people to look at. I took 5 minutes trying to make out where you were going and couldn't really figure it out.

It sucks getting criticism about something you've worked really hard on, but that's the breaks. It's actually really hard to get someone to be honest with you about stuff like that, so you might want to thank the poster.