Website Critique???

[Austin Langley]

I have just about finished my website. I worked out the kinks and think i've got most bugs squashed. Can I get opinions on it? I figure this is the right forum to ask in.

http://www.langleyphotography.com

[Drew Phillips]

I like it a lot - it's simple but still looks good. Sometimes people get too carried away with creativity and don't pay attention to navigation or ease of use. However, only the automotive section of your portfolio works for me.

[Mike Ditz]

IMO-

Not everybody know who Pete Lyons is and the part about hoping to get published someday is kind of a weak statement to put on a website that you are using to generate business.

MD

[E. John Thawley III]

One of your links is dead. All of the galleries except Automotive are dead. Once in the Automtive gallery, might be nice to have a quick link to each of the other galleries.

Design is very nice and I like the lead image. Everything I touched loaded FAST, which is the best way to get me to look deeply.

Nice.

[Todd Corzett]

the part about hoping to get published someday is kind of a weak statement to put on a website that you are using to generate business.
I noticed the same thing... not something you want in your bio (IMO).

One thing that hits me about the first page is that you are a pigeon photographer. I like the shot, but I think the initial image(s) you show will put what you really do into the minds of the viewers. I like the overall design. I'm not a big fan of the b&w images that turn into color on hover... it just take a little too long to load, and some of the images don't really look that great in b&w. I'm also not a fan of the "zoomed" thumbnail stuff, but it's not as bad as the b&w thing.

One MAJOR thing about your site... there are NO words! Everything that is listed in text appears to be part of an image, rather than as text. The reason this is a big issue is that search engines don't know what the image says (unless you tell them). To them, your site is just a bunch of images, no text, so nothing to rank you by. (Just noticed you didn't capitalize "austin" in the third phrase on the bio page). After converting my (mostly image based) website to one containing some text my search engine ranks climbed (and so did my search engine referral rates - and what people were searching was something other than my name).

-Todd...

[Daniel Buck]

I like the speed and simplicity. I like that in a website, as others have mentioned :-)

I would put more images in your galleries (I assume only the automotive gallery is up and running?). I'm guilty of not doing this, but having only your best work online is a must if you are looking to get business from your site. It would be better to have a few images like you do now, than to have twice as many that have a few not-so-good images in it. Even if you are emotionally attached to an image, if other folks can't catch the emotion, then it's not worth posting. So if you do add more, just pick and choose carefully. I need to sift through my images and rip out the bad ones, thats a hard thing todo when you are attached to the images!

[Austin Langley]

Thanks everybody for your quick responses. At the time of posting this thread, only the automotive gallery was live, but now the people gallery is up as well and i'll have the other two up soon. I'll just be putting a placeholder up in the meantime. The about section I plan to redo. It was just something i threw together without much thought, but after reviewing and hearing other's comments, I plan to rewrite it.

Todd -
I thought about the pigeon thing after i put up the page. It's easy to change and I also thought it wasn't the best homepage image. I plan to put an auto image up and put the pigeon into the landscape gallery (which i'll be changing to nature soon). As far as the all image site, I know very little about web design. I basically knew nothing before i started this site. I see what you're saying though about the search rankings. I may be renaming the images so they'll show in searches. As for the rest of the text, I'll probably leave as is because I really hate default fonts for the web. They leave so little room for experimentation. I think of my site as I would a flash site. I think i'll use meta tags with hopes of recieving searches.

E. John Thawley III -
Which link was dead for you? Three of the galleries were down but that'll be remidied soon.


Thanks again everybody and I'll keep APN updated as I complete the site.

[Jeff Boerio]

Like someone else mentioned, the speed at which images load is good. I like that it doesn't force me to resize my browser window.

I think your galleries should load an image by default. That's an opinion, though. Also, a link from one gallery to the others would be good, too. Fewer mouse clicks for someone to get where they want is always a good thing.

I don't like that the "active" picture in the gallery keeps the thumbnail in color. The reason I don't like that is because when you float over other images, it colorizes them, so you've got multiple thumbnails in color. Maybe the "active" gallery photograph could have a border around it rather than being colorized? Or maybe the floating over could put a border around the image and then colorize it when it becomes "active"?

Need to capitalize "Austin" in "Recently, Austin has ... "on the About page.

Another personal opinion ... the "grey" 'LANGLEY' in the background could be "pulled back" just a little bit so that the top of the letters isn't cut off.
On your contact page, you might want to change your email address to a graphic image. Otherwise, bots will come and harvest the email address and you'll get spam for all sorts of sex toys, mortgages, pills, software and Nigerian money transfer offers.

Nice opening image, by the way.

- Jeff

[Jeff Boerio]

One MAJOR thing about your site... there are NO words! Everything that is listed in text appears to be part of an image, rather than as text. The reason this is a big issue is that search engines don't know what the image says (unless you tell them). To them, your site is just a bunch of images, no text, so nothing to rank you by. (Just noticed you didn't capitalize "austin" in the third phrase on the bio page). After converting my (mostly image based) website to one containing some text my search engine ranks climbed (and so did my search engine referral rates - and what people were searching was something other than my name).

-Todd...

This borders on hijacking the thread, but I'll take the chance.

This is an interesting notion. What about the use of <META></META> tags in the HTML source code? Shouldn't that be enough to take care of search engines? I'd think so.

- Jeff

[John Thawley]

This borders on hijacking the thread, but I'll take the chance.

This is an interesting notion. What about the use of <META></META> tags in the HTML source code? Shouldn't that be enough to take care of search engines? I'd think so.

- Jeff

Jeff: Meta tags are used by many crawlers or bots in more ways than one. One of those use is for the bot to comare the tags to the page content and "weigh" the results for "relevance." So... it sees the meta description, keywords and even the page title... then it will "score" the page based on how many times those words are used in the actual page text/content.

What Todd was pointing out is that if the entire site is made up of "graphics" or "images" and there is no text, the bots will carry on. Although, just like using frames, there are methods to point the bots to descriptive text and what they call "follow" instructions to point the bot to a dummy page of relevant content. But they're leary of that.

The game is that of the guys that write the parameters the bots use when they search against the guys that try to bury code in their pages to get the bots to llo where they want them to look.

JT

[Jeff Boerio]

What Todd was pointing out is that if the entire site is made up of "graphics" or "images" and there is no text, the bots will carry on. Although, just like using frames, there are methods to point the bots to descriptive text and what they call "follow" instructions to point the bot to a dummy page of relevant content. But they're leary of that.

The game is that of the guys that write the parameters the bots use when they search against the guys that try to bury code in their pages to get the bots to llo where they want them to look.

JT

True.

So I suppose the fact that my gallery is contained in a XML file and each image is opened in a new window, the bots probably aren't picking up that information, even though the resulting web page includes descriptive text?

Maybe time to re-evaluate my gallery (which isn't even fully programmed yet) :)

- Jeff

[John Thawley]

Well, again.. it's not just a matter of the bots or spyders finding it... it's how they score the page that makes it climb in rank. Rember, their customer is the search box user. So, they want to boast that they provide the most relevant results to the users search words and/or query.

If your XML data includes robust captions and keywords... and those also mirror or replicate what is in your page META tags... that is a plus... but the deeper the bot or spyderd has to drill the less it will score the relevance.

Link backs are another piece of the puzzle. Called link popularity. People were creating tons of dumb pages and directories to link back to their own sites. Once the engines got wise to that, they start ranking the importance of the page linking back. So, let's say ilovecars.com links to your site.... it will not score as high as it would if espn.com were linked to you. Link popularity remains an important ingredient... but the status of who's linking back will trump numbers. Quality trumps quantity in this case.

Try a search on "motorsports photographer" or "world challenge series" ;)

JT