New Artist website

David DelMonte

Hi all, I've recently rebuilt a web site for a local artist. RapidWeaver is the base. It relies also on ecmascripts that I wrote, bought, found. The carousel is image flow by Finn Rudolph. The slide show mechanism is from Highslide - Torstein Honsi in the Arctic. The image fade in/outs are mine. Every page is a Stacks page, and the theme is one from Henk that I modded a bit. Other than the image pages, every page is user-managed with the WebYep CMS. The images are sized, uploaded to the site, and are listed in a user-unfriendly XML file. That's for the next round.

The site is beatricehamblett.com

I would appreciate any feedback, especially regarding typography, viewing on weird browsers and systems, etc.

Thanks!!

David

iSights

Don't like the extremely slow photo transitions on the home page. You spend more time watching them fade in and out than you do viewing the images.

David DelMonte

Now I know I'm on the right track.. Thank you for your deconstructive critique. Please show me your work. Regarding Faros, the greek site. There is an english looking flag and if you could press that, you may find that the site shows in English. How about that!! Too many css files. Why do you think that happened? Do you think I should redo the site just to consolidate them? why?

There is a saying that if you don't have anything positive to say, you shouldn't say anything... It's bad karma. Still, maybe you're a great programmer/designer so lets see what you've done..

I love being impressed.

iSights

@David DelMonte : "There is a saying that if you don't have anything positive to say, you shouldn't say anything..."

Touchy, aren't we? First, this is a forum dedicated to website critiques. (critique: evaluate in a detailed and/or analytical way). If you simply wanted people to gush over your site and pat you on the head, you should have said so in the first place.

Second, regarding the Faros CSS files, I already told you how to fix it. Go into Preferences and tell RapidWeaver to consolidate your style sheets and common files. You check one box and republish the site. No need to "redo" everything.

Third, the "english looking flag" only exists down and to the side on the home page. We live in the age of Google, search engines, and deep linking, and you have no guarantee that visitors are going to hit your home page first. Translation services/links should be on EVERY page.

Fourth, every bit of text on the Faros Home page is an image. That's not user friendly, and it's certainly not SEO friendly.

Fifth, most of the internal pages are not using H1, H2 tags for page titles and subtitles. Again, not SEO friendly as it makes Google's job in indexing your site that much more difficult.

Sixth, the embossed home page images are pretty '90s.

The photo website is nice and relatively understated, which complements the photos.

Again, I don't like the home page transitions, and I don't like splash pages in general. Most usability folk like Jakob Nielson would tell you to do without. IMO, you'd be much, much better off treating the "Recent Work" page as the home page.

That way I can get to the photo galleries (the point of a photography site) without clicking on a page so I can get to a page where I can actually see images.

The carousel is... cute. Takes a little time to load (clear your cache and view the site from scratch) with a high-bandwidth connection and doesn't work well at all on a low-bandwidth connection (45s on iPad/3G) with 16 images.

Overall, much better than the Faros site, but a lot of that comes from a good theme and because it's supported by good photography.

Better

iSights

BTW, the photo site could use the consolidate CSS trick too. Every single file that has to be requested (especially CSS) slows down the page build. Google spent months improving their search result speeds by 1/10th of a second, and were proud of it.

Ricinport

Desperately, desperately, desperately slooooowwwwwwwwww.
Or is that bad karma?

David DelMonte

Thanks to both of you. Better Karma now The speed of the front images was a client choice. Good idea to consolidate the CSS. The Faros images I will have to think about. Again, they were provided by the client. The language choice is not simply location based, but because the site is used mainly from Greece, but used in some english speaking countries, they wanted to have the site split as it is, definitely not translated on the fly in either language. As you might imagine, this went through some legal vetting as well as through medical review.

Finally, I apologize if my ego got in the way this morning.

iSights

Really, the fact the client supplied the images is irrelevant. Your job, as the consultant, is to explain the facts of life to the client, and the facts are that providing body text as images means that his site isn't going to rate high on search engines, and in many cases will not be found at all. It's just not SEO friendly.

If they really like the look, just make a plain version to use as a background for blocks that contain actual text. Problem solved.

And I'm not talking about the language choice, I'm talking about the Greek/English translation icons. They should be high on every single page so that people landing on an internal page know that an English version (or vice-versa, a Greek version) is available.

Forgive me, but it's kind of dumb to create two versions of a site, and hide the fact that there are two versions below the fold on a single page.