Rewrote my homepage. Thoughts?

greengiant · 31 May 2008 at 21:54

Hi guys.
Finally finished re-writing my webpage, still to go through all the images and add watermarks etc, however I think the main layout is done and dusted.

I'd welcome your feedback on how the page looks layout and function wise.

Thanks in advance!

http://www.brianinnesphotography.co.uk/

seaviewuk · 31 May 2008 at 21:59

I think the home page link should not be capitalised.

Otherwise, neat and tidy!

SilverPenguin · 31 May 2008 at 22:09

I like it all except the way the panoramic gallery doesn't work in the same way the others do. Other than that it works well!

seaviewuk · 31 May 2008 at 22:18

On the 'About' page.

Wildlife is missing an 'l'

edit; fixed? or was I not seeing it!

edit 2: No it's not there!

King4aDay · 31 May 2008 at 22:57

I'm not an expert by any means, but I have to say I strongly dislike the way the secondary scroll wheels open up within the main content area when viewing some of the pictures. Also the grey text is a bit unsightly IMO. The general layout seems fine though and you've some nice shots

A.N.Other · 31 May 2008 at 23:27

Pretty good overall, I quite like it.

The way you've got the internal frame means that when the images display, only the frame darkens, which looks a bit random.

I take it you've used the frame so that the bottom and top are always displaying, which is fine in itself but it does mean that I get two scroll bars now, as on this screen I can't get the whole page on anyway. On a higher resolution screen, this wouldn't occur, but browsing on my laptop at the moment, it looks a bit clumsy.

The font within the frame is a different colour to that outside. Not sure about that. If I were going for a single colour, then it would be the lighter shade (is it white?) rather than the grey, as it stands out better.

If you're going to have an image on the front page, why don't you do a little script that will display a different one each time you view the page to add a bit of interest?

Hope that helps.

TheAlex · 1 Jun 2008 at 00:14

It looks fine to me, though I agree with the comment about the panoramas page. I actually like how just the frame darkens when you look at the photos.

One error I had; the About Me page just changes the frame to a block of white when I click on it.

Paul11 · 1 Jun 2008 at 10:54

what is the picture viewer you have used that makes the page go dark like that?

greengiant · 1 Jun 2008 at 18:22

Thanks for the feedback.
Those who are having problems with the webpage size what screen resolution are you running? It wouldn't be too difficult for me to tweak the layout so that it is more low res friendly.

I agree with the comments about the panorama page - not sure how best to lay this page out.

The pic display is lightbox2:

http://www.lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/

The gallery frames are bit of PHP which add each image to a table, the image caption being read from the Exif "Image Description" field.

SilverPenguin · 1 Jun 2008 at 18:32

Why don't you just do them the same as the other pages and have sqaure thumbs? I struggled with my site and how to have the thumbs and in the end went for square on everything including my panormaic gallery as it keeps the site flowing nicely.

A.N.Other · 1 Jun 2008 at 19:44

greengiant said:
Those who are having problems with the webpage size what screen resolution are you running? It wouldn't be too difficult for me to tweak the layout so that it is more low res friendly.

1440x900 - default resolution for the MacBook Pro. Obviously it looks fine on my 1920x1200 though.

Irish_Tom · 1 Jun 2008 at 19:47

From a designers point of view I don't like the type. That's just my opinion though.

I'd try it smaller and not bold. Also I don't like HOME being all caps.

The type in the 'about' section is different to the rest as well and it's pretty ugly.

I like the rest of it though, except the panorama gallery.

Panzer

greengiant · 1 Jun 2008 at 21:10

A.N.Other said:
1440x900 - default resolution for the MacBook Pro. Obviously it looks fine on my 1920x1200 though.

Dropped my monitor down to 1440x900, yes, the scroll bars on some of the larger pictures are a bit annoying to say the least. I think this could be due to the fact that lighbox is running in the gallery iframe rather. Might be better if lightbox2 opened overlaying the entire site rather than the gallery iframe.

Google suggests that lightbox2 cannot do this (open the image outside of the iframe, so looks like a quick rewrite needed without using iframes!

)

A.N.Other · 1 Jun 2008 at 21:19

Another thing ... from an aesthetic standpoint ... lots of the images display as completely different sizes. For me it would look better if they were all resized to fit a standard size, say 600px on the longest size, for example.

greengiant · 4 Jun 2008 at 21:30

A.N.Other said:
Another thing ... from an aesthetic standpoint ... lots of the images display as completely different sizes. For me it would look better if they were all resized to fit a standard size, say 600px on the longest size, for example.

Good point. However I've always been led to believe that when resizing an image you should resize it so it's either a quater size, half size, or exactly one third to get the best possible image quality?

TheAlex · 4 Jun 2008 at 21:36

I wouldn't think that'd make a visible difference on a 72dpi display?

mrk · 5 Jun 2008 at 13:50

Doesn't matter the size you use as long as it's resized using a good filter, the widely accepted method is a bicubic resize and for web display nothing larger than 800 pixels wide. 600 is fine but landscape shots won't favour a 600pixel wide resize

800 is the sweet spot for H width whilst a portrait image suits anywhere from 500 to 600 respectively.