My new website

[paul stimac]

http://www.paulstimac.com

This is a rough draft so comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Amund BLix Aaeng]

Looks good to me, not too crowded and to the point. I`d use a different photograph for the opening page though. Save that shot for a "about me" section..

[PViapiano]

Paul...

I really like it...and your photos! Nice use of white space...

[Photomax]

Paul,

I really like your work. However I am less enthused about the website. Its a little sparse. The navigation at the top is confusing. Both your name and the contact links are email links. The center link goes to a bookstore? Its not working. I thought the arrows on either side of the top center link were navigation arrows for the images. They are not.

The site is designed with Frames which is a very poor method of building a web gallery. The text is small but it is not scaleable for end users. There is no meta data and will suffer from poor search engine performance. There is no biographical text or any information about you or your photography.

Your photography is good, no doubt about that. But, the images have issues as well. The images looked pixelated and over sharpened. Some have contrast issues as well. A thin border will help "contain" the light snow scenes from bleeding into the white background of the page. The images are also way too large for a website. I tested one random panoramic and it was over 230K when around 30-60K would work well. There is a long pause while the fresh image gets downloaded. Users with slow connections will think that something is wrong with the site and give up. Again, the shots look very "peppery" from over sharpening?

I would redo all the images using proper "save for web" techniques. I would also ditch the Frames and look into building the site using modern, Web Standards Design techniques. Doing so will add enhanced usability and add a significant "polish" to the overall design. Using CSS for all the styles and layout will really make a better presentation for your fine photography.

Hope this helps!

Max

[Frank Petronio]

I like the style and design but not the obsolete construction methods (frames). The issue with the construction and coding is that it's going to be a hard stite for searchers to find, a pain to update, hard for people with disabilities, and it is going to look wildly different between browsers.

But I like the overall look of it. Which is ironic because it picks up design clues from modern, well-built sites.

The Nav is a little funky and the arrows to move through the photos are in an odd place between an unrelated statement. Be brave enough to spell it out, tell people what to do, give them choices. I love minimalism but using words to explain are usually a good thing.

If I were you I'd use this as a template to give to an experienced web developer (NOT a graphic designer in most cases)(and not me at all) to build properly. It won't be expensive -- you've already nailed the hardest part by having good content. The value of this current test site is you can test your concepts and sequencing. But you really ought to abandon the code and the WYSIWYG software -- it truly sucks.

The photos really beg for captions, especially the beautiful "misc" ones.

I love the home page image of yourself photographing. And you shouldn't be shy about revealing a some information about yourself. If I want to buy a print or hire you then I want to know about the artist - otherwise I would probably justs go buy a stock photo from an anoymous site. So let more personality enter - but just do it with good code and "best practices". So from a marketing perspective, I'd put more pictures of yourself photographing into it. They are fun and interesting to ALL.

Good luck.

[Photomax]

Paul,

I see that Frank's observations pretty much echo my own. The design works, but the structure and mechanics of the code is awful.

Please note that IF your photography sucked I would not say as much. Using web standards coding will really make this site a place worth visiting.

Let me know if you need more info. You could also retain me for a decent fee to do all the coding for you if that would help. I am doing web sites for clients in addition to my commercial photography...

Cheers,

Max

[Brian Ellis]

I don't possess the web-building expertise others here have but you certainly do have some spectacular photographs. As others have said, some captions would be nice, also the addition of an "about me" section and maybe a few more groupings instead of just the two plus miscellaneous. I had no trouble navigating and each image appeared quickly so at least with my system there were no problems from that standpoint. But the main thing I looked at was the photographs since I wouldn't have a clue as to how one builds a web site, and your photographs are wonderful.

[paul stimac]

Thanks for all the advice.

It's not made with frames but definetly by someone who knows nothing about building websites (me).

I'm on a very limited budget which is why I built it myself. I'm worried that if I pay someone to re-build it I'll have to pay them everytime I wanted to update it -- not to mention that I don't have a lot of money to pay someone in the first place.

Max and Frank how much are we talking about? I've got some lenses and other equipment I could trade if either of you is up for the task.

[Frank Petronio]

If you build it properly, updating is a breeze because you will only have to change a few lines of code.

i no longer build websites hands-on but I if you don't mind doing the cut and pasting to make the individual pages, it shouldn't take than about 20 hours for a good developer to build and refine a template for you to work from, plus some "hand-holding". From there you'd be able to do the repetitive production work (maybe another 10 hours) and make updates easily.

A good student at your local tech college might charge $35. The guy I uses is too busy, teaches CSS and writes books about it, and knows his stuff cold. He charges $100 per hour but is at least 2X-3X faster than the student and doesn't make many mistakes.

I'd probably a budget of $500 to $1000 and interview locals (craiglist is actually OK for this - lots of geeks on it) plus the programmer meets design site referered to on my cleanpage website. (You can pay more of course -- once you get going it is easy to fall into "feature creep" and overdo the website.)

The ideal candidate is someone who does this for a big company and who wants a little freelance on the side.

When you are interviewing the key words are CSS based sites and W3C validation. Everyone says they can do this easily but ask to see the actual sites they've built and see if they valiadate. Most don't and this points to sloppy coding mostly.

If you can't find a local I am sure there are a few lurkers here (and Max) who might help you. And you might even trade!

[Photomax]

Paul,

There a ton of ways of building sites. Certain techniques become quite fashionable like Flash. Personally I don't like Flash sites.

I am not pimping my services here. This is not the section on this great board for that. Please mail me with questions about costs etc if you are interested.

But to answer your question about getting into having to shell out money every time you want to add or subtract to your site: having a web standards, CSS based site makes this process a lot easier. There is no embedded slide show or movie file that has to be rebuilt. If you are capable of basic cutting, copying and pasting you can do all the changes yourself. The beauty of full implementation of CSS is that all the control of typography and layout(the actual design) resides in an external file that controls all pages with a site. This means that actual html or xhtml code for the pages is very light, efficient and easy to edit: its easy to see the actual content once all the font tags and table structure is removed from the actual pages.

I would have a guy build you a full CSS site and design the galleries without tables, frames, javscript or Flash.

With CSS (cascading style sheets) the CSS file is controlling the function of the gallery. You will not have to mess with the CSS file just the individual gallery pages. The gallery pages will be individual like gallery1.html, gallery2.html, gallery3.html. Adding photos will be fairly straightforward: you do a "save as" for the last gallery page and then "save as" the next number. Huh? For example, say the last photo was gallery20.html, then you open that page and "save as" gallery21.html. Once saved you then cut out the code that refers to the previous photo and add the code for the new photo with its name, size, caption, etc. You will also have to change a little bit of code that refers to the "next" and "previous" navigation. Its all done with changing a few bits of code, using some basic cutting and pasting. This may sound complicated but once you have done it once or twice it becomes very mechanical. You can also use all the other gallery pages as a reference to make sure you make the changes correctly. It will only perform correctly if the code is 100% perfect.

I encourage you to take the time to study and learn how it works. The better you understand how it works then the easier it will be to maintain etc. This method is designed to use light code and will allow changes and additions to be made. You will not need any expensive software, just a basic text editor and an FTP program to access the web server (to put the fresh or edited pages into the proper location so end users can view the material etc.)

Want to see some galleries of powerful CSS designs? See the list below. This method of web design simply rocks. I see most Flash heavy sites as being "so 2001" by comparison.

Again, contact me if you are interested in me doing the coding for you etc.

Max

http://cssmania.com/
http://www.unmatchedstyle.com/
http://www.cssbeauty.com/
http://bestwebgallery.com/category/css/
http://www.cssreboot.com/
http://csstux.com