My website is now finished and on line thanks to my daughter. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible with emphasis on the images, not as a marketing tool. Please take a look, we welcome suggestions for improvement.
http://mergross.com/
My website is now finished and on line thanks to my daughter. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible with emphasis on the images, not as a marketing tool. Please take a look, we welcome suggestions for improvement.
http://mergross.com/
Nice site Merg! It's very easy to navigate. I like it.
As I expected, great work and well presented. You should be happy.
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
Merg,
Very nice. Clean, simple, well presented.
Great images, Merg!
I had to look again to notice the site and I have a few remarks and suggestions:
1. This is a matter of taste, but I would eliminate the gap between the menu and the main content area. Nothing critical, but it does distract a little.
2. The margins around "exhibits/collections" page header are different - much larger than on the rest of the pages. Again, not a show stopper, just a matter of consistency.
3. Ditto for Portfolio One.
Speaking of Portfolios, the next two are the most serious remarks:
4. Individual image pages lack both the identity AND the navigation. I understand that you have probably decided to take away any distractions from individual images, but a common practice is to at the very least use the minimized versions of the logo and site-wide navigation.
5. Image-to-image navigation: There are only two choices - "Next Image" and the "Back to portfolio". Again, I understand this may well be a conscious choice, but the common practice is to have "Previous", "Back to portfolio" and "Next", on the left middle and right respectively.
Another recommendation for the same section - placing image navigation above the image tends to keep it from moving up and down depending on the image height and thus makes it easier for the user to navigate without having to move the mouse.
6. Finally, I would also recommend creating a simplified, small text version of the main navigation and place it at the very bottom of every page. This is another common practice that helps users navigate to other pages without having to go back to top of the page they just viewed/read.
Overall, simple, clean and rather conservative design that emphasizes your images.
Congratulations.
Marko
Last edited by Marko; 24-Jan-2008 at 15:16.
Beautiful Merg.
The opening image is very strong, I would like to see it first hand.
Giacomelli came to mind, even though your work is more refined technically.
Merg,
Love it!
Well done and I am happy to be able to see your fine work whenever I like. It will become a favorite site for me to visit.
Nice job to you and your daughter,
Really nice site and amazing photography Merg. I'd love to see your work in person sometime.
-Brad
Looking over this quickly I agree with Marko on almost everything.
Functionally, this is a great site. I think this is what a good site is supposed to be like: simple, clean, easy to understand and navigate.
Why not put a self-portrait in the About section instead of just text?
The view camera article which you're using in the bio section is quite long and wordy so I would break it up somehow - using pullquotes for example.
On a more technical level, I wouldn't use "background-color" in the CSS and instead would use just plain "background" which is the preferred way to set the background color, but your css validates anyway.
You have one HTML validation error:
Line 54: there is no attribute "bordercolor".
…ding="0" cellspacing="0" bordercolor="#666666">
It would be easy to get rid of the tables and do a pure CSS layout too, if you so desire.
All photography sites suffer from 1 problem: not enough text. Your home page for example has no real text content just a single photo (you can change that image easily, right? It would be boring to have to see the same image all the time each time I visited your site) This relative lack of text is understandable since the emphasis is on photos but you would improve your search rankings if you included more text on the various pages.
I suggest submitting it to Google since the site doesn't seem to be indexed yet.
I'll repeat what the others have said: outstanding images presented in an clean, simple manner.
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