website feedback

stevephoto

Hello,

I'm Steve. Just wondering if anyone wants to have a look at some of my photos and offer some advice and feedback. I generally just get the odd praise from friends and family. I've done the site myself (its running slow at the moment) but would be great to get feedback on that also.

I only got into the photography in the past two years when travelling, even though I've a background in media.

I dont have the money yet for nice filters,lens but I'm hoping when I do my skills can improve.

Happy snapping

http://stevensheehy.com/

dogski

Your website is pretty cool but does take time to load, just be weary of this as people will tend to get bored and leave the site. Your photos are excellent though, they really tell a story.

stevephoto

thanks dogski. i'm still learning about page loads, speeds etc, so not sure how much i can improve on.

dinneenp

Hi Steven,

As above, slow to load. most people would be long gone by the time it loads.
Very nice photos.
Here's constructive feedback, I'm only picking out the faults I see, not focusing on what's right about the site.

On homepage- maybe pull all the contents up slightly so your intro blurb isn't sitting on the very bottom & I have to scroll to view the very end of page.
small thing but the light on the far left is distracting to me

Photo page-
I find it slightly confusing that you have teh same category listed a few times.
Could you have categories listed once with teh different shoots under each one?

the 'load more' is a bit subtle, many people might miss it.

Travel- it’s not obvious from the navigation bar what travel refers to- your travels, travel work etc. maybe call it travel writings or similar?
Why not leave it out until you have content?

About-
with a range of experience, skills and software knowledge including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere, Pro Tools, AVID/ Final Cut Pro, Flash, typography, media law, social media trends, virtual worlds, digital media and advertising.
That’s a massive ‘including’ list (13 items), why not list the most important and reduce the list, list them all elsewhere.

He has spent many years working as an Assistant Director on a range of projects from high end commercials, music videos, soaps, low budget shorts and Bollywood feature films.
Grammatically this is wrong I think. If you use ‘from’ shouldn’t the sentence end with ‘to’ Bollywood feature films. Maybe replace with ‘range of projects including…’

It mightn’t be relevant but you’ve a bucket load of skills, experience listed but I’ve no idea how long you’ve been working, just says ‘many years’.

If I click on ‘about’ from the navigation bar it brings me to ‘Bio’ page.

Contact-
‘full up the form’ sounds odd to me.
It’s obvious to me but others mightn’t know what the * is for.
Small thing but I put in ‘Your email address will not be published or spammed.’
Again could be a personal thing but for me your contact page is very impersonal/cold. Here’s what I’ve done on my contact page

Why not include your Facebook, twitter & other contact methods in contact and/or about page. E.g. you can also find me on x, y, z.

TV/Film credits-
This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below
Why?

‘This post is password protected’.
Shouldn’t that be ‘the page’

very small thing- in your navigation bar make the current page that you're on bold/slightly different that the other pages.

tricky D

Very slow loading. Some pages aren't loading at all or just taking ages.

Use a grid system for your thumbnail layouts. The discrepancy in vertical alignment of the placeholders is a bit off-putting. Link the whole placeholder, not just the image, but the text too.

Redo the About dropdown nav menu. It is performing badly when trying to move the mouse down to eg. contact link with the menu disappearing intermittently.

DO NOT DISABLE RIGHT CLICK. It's bloody annoying. If you want to protect your images, watermark them degrade them or take the hit, but do not mess with normal and expected browser functions. It is also trivial for anyone who has a bit of a clue to get to the images despite disabling right click.

The descriptive text content eg. in the photos section is being pulled into the gallery in a way that hides it from search spiders so it has no SEO value. That also applies to the image urls and the alt values. Fix this as you need this text for SEO which needs a lot of work. Use better descriptive filenames for your photos when the content is visible to search spiders, eg. hot_springsnewzealand.jpg would be better as hot-springs-new-zealand-photograph.jpg.

Try to define the purpose of your site better: is it for photo sales, portfolio, services sales, vanity (I don't mean that negatively in any way)?

Pages are nice and responsive for mobile and tablet - excellent.

hth/gl

stevephoto

thanks I've tried to implement some of your suggestions and will continue to work on it. It'll take a while to get things working properly. As best as I can the site is as fast as I can have it (unless I removed the homepage slider).
the purpose of the site was initially to apply for design/media jobs by showing a range of skills. now that I've secured some work, I'll probably just focus on keeping it photography based (to motivate me to shoot more often) and to improve web design skills.