New Music Photography Website

gizzymo

After nearly a year of "I'll do it this weekend" I finally setup a site dedicated to Music Photography work.

http://www.ShootTheSound.com

This may be of interest to those interested in this field, I had received feedback from a couple of band managers that my previous website that had wedding stuff on it too, was a turnoff! It seems that seeing weddings on the site, cheapened in from their perspective, hence why I set this up.

A good site is never "finished" but I'm pretty happy that the bones are there.

I'd really appreciate any thoughts or ideas on what I could do better with the site and I'm especially eager to hear if any of it is broken in certain browsers.

I've done a fair amount of browser testing already and I think I've got most of the kinks out, but to be honest, I'm sure there are more.

Pete

* A logo is in development - current logo is a stopgap

dazftw

Yeah I hate going onto a photographers website who claim they specialise in weddings/portraits but have a landscape/nature gallery.

Your work is good im sure you know that but what I did notice and maybe its just me(the cleaner and simpler the site the better)

The second I go on to you page I'm greeted with 7 pictures and 15 buttons.. Even more if you count the links on the bottom. You also have a facebook link twice on the home page. Its a bit much in my opinion.

kfish2oo2

dazftw wrote: »

Yeah I hate going onto a photographers website who claim they specialise in weddings/portraits but have a landscape/nature gallery.

Your work is good im sure you know that but what I did notice and maybe its just me(the cleaner and simpler the site the better)

The second I go on to you page I'm greeted with 7 pictures and 15 buttons.. Even more if you count the links on the bottom. You also have a facebook link twice on the home page. Its a bit much in my opinion.

This is a good point - the bottom facebook link is unnecessary.

The very top bar of social networking links is great, but you need to find a way of visually separating the flickr and facebook links a lot more - as they are, they're very close to indistinguishable from each other and it looks like you have two facebook links in there - which doesn't look very professional.

This site is a bit cluttered, but honestly I think it serves its purpose well. The clutter never overwhelms the subject matter and the navigation scheme is very good - simple and intuitive.

I do have one criticism of the topbar though - the element layout on the right makes a slope going from left to right, whereas your logo on the left is centered. This is probably nitpicking, but it doesn't flow very well. I think it might look better if you either laid out the navigation and social networking buttons differently or aligned your logo to the left. Also, your logo is a bit small in comparison with other site elements. Finally the log in button is floating - never float a button unless it has a very specific design purpose. As it is, it looks like you ran out of space and just plonked it anywhere it could fit.

thebaz

I would remove the Alice Cooper one from your opening page , it makes site look a little like a gaming web site - it is a good image , but not in this context (front of web page ) IMO - the black eyed peas one is great , and works much better

gizzymo

Just a quick thanks to you all for the constructive, useful feedback I'll be working on various changes based on this ove the coming days !

dinneenp

I agree a lot with the above comments.
Photos are great.Are you using a Themeforest template?

I don't like your name/link back to home page on the end of pages. No need for it.


I don't like the big amount of links in the top right hand corner. Put them all on another page. If you want to have a prominent link to Twitter/Facebook why not add a widget on the far right hand side (like this, which I have on my site?

If I click on Facebook it redirects me, why not open Facebook in a new tab/browser?

About:
There's no photo of you. i find if there's on it helps people to 'humanise' you, could make the person 'connect' with you, rather than a faceless person...

On the about page you have the following text-
Please click through the Portfolio section linked above to see some of his work
Why not make the word 'portfolio' clickable?

Why bother with the Slider with images on the about page? Fine on the home page to feature your best photos but if I'm on the about page I want to read about you. If I want to view more photos I'll go to Portfolio page.

I dont' know if it's very relevant but do you want to tell people where you are based?

News:
curious title, it's more 'blog' or recent works or similar.
Personally I think all items should have a few lines of text to explain. e.g. Elbow at Belsonic Belfast has no 'intro' text.
you should have a larger space between news items, it's not easy to distinguish where one ends and the next starts.

Services:
if you want to have the Slider images why not feature some of your services other than gig photos- album cover shots etc.

Maybe include some text and a link to contact me on the services page.

Contact:
The 'please use the form' seems misalligned, should be over to the left.

e-mail- put in name[replacethiswith@]... or similar to stop spam

general:

Remove the breadcrumbs if you can. should be able to.

What lenses do you shoot with?

Cheers,
Pa.