Barry Cliver Photography

Elements Built with Elements
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Deployed my new website last week. (I must still fix up the Contact page). The image galleries are great but I’m still not totally happy with the “look and feel “of the Home page. Gives me something to play with :slight_smile: The purpose is a portfolio, and I hope to expand into web-based sales. Criticism and feedback are welcome.

Elements is a powerful, well-designed tool. If you are new to Elements, I suggest watching the tutorial videos and leverage the Theme. I am glad I upgraded from RapidWeaver!

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Ok, you asked for comments.

I don’t like the bounce you get from the text and photos when you scroll down the home page, it feels a bit gimmicky. A fade might work better?

Is the drop down menu under gallery meant to be transparent?

Not sure how big your photos are but the individual gallery pages were too slow loading for me. 32 seconds for Adriatic, 42 seconds for Africa. Europe took longer but I did not time it.

I know you said you still had to fix the contact page. I noticed the text field for the message is the same as the page colour so you cannot see the box. I can see the little drag handle for it which gives it away. Also on the contact page is a tick box to agree with your privacy policy but no link to the actual policy?

That was on my mac. On my iPhone I could not wait for the home page images to load, they must be way too big.

With the burger menu your text goes over the top of your logo and can’t be read. When you drop down the gallery menu a lot of that is illegible if over a light photo. I think it may work better if your menu had a background of sorts?

Please take all that as constructive as you did ask. You have made me want to go and dust off my passport.

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Nice photos. I agree with jbyfield’s comment about the text and photos jumping around. Not very nice. However, I don’t have any problem loading the photos. They open instantly as soon as I click.

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This is great feedback! Thank you for taking the time to go through the site!!
I did worry about loading times, but at the local library they were reasonably fast. Thanks again!

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It is only the main gallery pages that are slow loading for me. Once an image has loaded on the main gallery page it opens instantly when I click on it and navigate through that gallery.

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This website has the potential to become great. The images are beautiful, the colors harmonious, and the logo is well-designed.

I suggest you refine it in several steps and fix the the most important issues first.

  • Page Size: The Chrome Browser reports the file size to be nearly 40 MB. The elephant image alone accounts for approximately 3 MB. If you export your images as WebP at a smaller size and reduce their quality slightly, you should be able to significantly reduce the page’s footprint. Additionally, you should probably consider implementing lazy loading if you haven’t already.
  • Animations, as mentioned earlier, are distracting. A simple fade would be more effective.
  • The layout is confusing because there are no lines, spaces, or borders that guide the eye and help determine what belongs together.
  • The logo is visually appealing, but its size is excessive, and the background is distracting. Consider reversing the logo and creating a version where the text is positioned to the right of the tree.
  • The “Galleries” dropdown has a z-order issue. Try setting layout > isolate on the container below.
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Like others have said fix the bounce - I do 40px fade in over 2000ms with a 175ms delay

I’m really writing though to complement your photos!!! Wow :open_mouth: amazing work!!!

I don’t travel much and it was great to see your photos!!! Really nice :+1:

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Thank you for the excellent suggestions, and I have already implemented some. I will also reduce the image sizes, and that should help with the Home page. Thanks again!

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Good start. And yes… image sizes and compression is a huge issue on your site. Please check your Google Page Speed results and especially the “Improve Image Delivery” section.

Your images on the homepage alone are 23 Megabyte (!!!) in size of wich 20 Megabyte can easily be saved by reducing the image size and quality / compression. There are apps and websites you can use for that. And please don’t stop there :wink:

There are some basic SEO issues too (no meta description, no H1 Tag which is the main heading of each page and should be used once only). Think of header tags as chapter titles in a book.

I’m a sucker for accessibility, and there is still much room for improvement in this area. You can check what to fix here: Wave accessibility report - if you care at all.