Please take a look at this draft (Wedding Photography biz)

[adpalumbo]

EDIT: Time has passed, and I've bumped the thread up because we now have a whole new site live at http://www.jessicaverma.com/ that incorporates many of the things we discussed. It's very different than either of the old sites, and I would appreciate some new input. More details are mentioned in my bump-post down below.


Hi,

If anybody's got the time, please take a look at this draft of an update my fiancee and I are working on for her wedding/portrait photography website.

The draft update is up at:
http://febupdate.jessicaverma.com

The original site, for comparison, is at:
http://www.jessicaverma.com

We're looking for a site that presents her work and carries the tone of her friendly business and work ethic. Also, We've purposefully chosen not to use the un-navigable flash that most competing photographers use because nobody but other photographers seem to like that on a business website. Instead, we're trying to keep a simple, functional, and navigable layout using recognizable usage patterns.

Suggestions of any order--small or large--are welcome. The logo is also new, so we also welcome comments on it.

Thanks!

Andrew (and Jessica)

[adpalumbo]

Bump and revisit

Hello again, everybody.

I want to thank you all again for taking the time to look at that draft we did a while ago. It's been about two months now, but we took many of your suggestions into account, along with feedback from some other sources including friends, clients, and colleagues, and came up with the site that is currently live.

It's at www.jessicaverma.com and we would love to have some more feedback on it, both good and bad.

Unfortunately, I couldn't leave the old samples up for comparison so comments are going to have to be made ex nihilo.

Again, we appreciate all your help!

-Andrew

[Richard S]

Sorry no comment on the site, I didn't realy notice it.

All I saw was some absloutly fantastic photos.

[Shani]

This site is much cleaner and more cohesive than I remember the original. Good job. Also, as Richard S noted, the photography has now taken a much more central focus, which is fantastic. But, I looked deeper for you.

First of all, I personally divide the site into two parts: photography examples, and information. The "home" button is part of the examples nav, so I'm expecting it to be a portfolio set like weddings or portraits, so I would move the home button either to the other side, or somewhere else where it's independent. (Did that make sense?)

Next, the text is small. This is referring to the bodies of text in the information pages. I think the serif font works, but it also makes the bodies of text more difficult to read, so it should be larger.

Finally, and this is the big one. The rollovers! Even on the portfolio pages, the rollovers are awkward. They literally jump! It's almost as if the _over image is larger than the _up image. I found this most distracting on the wedding rates page because the WHOLE layout shifted when I touched an image. (An as an aside, the name of the package makes for a very convenient link to more info, which is a good idea for usability, but note this is in addition to and not in lieu of the picture being a link.)

[adpalumbo]

Thanks to both of you.

DCScene,

I was wondering what the response would be to that rollover bug. In my tests, it didn't *seem* like a very big bug, and only occured when using a recent Mozilla/Firefox and Opera. I only experienced a minor shift in the image, not a whole layout change. But I'll have to take another look. What browser/version were you using?

The incompatibility itself is because I'm trying to do the rollover in CSS using the hover selector rather than using javascript and an alternate image. IE has some problems with this, as it only interprets hover on anchor elements, and only when the anchor--and not just its sub-elements--are altered by it. Its really quirky. I guess I'll have to put more time into figuring it out.

Anyway, thanks again!

[Shani]

I'm on a Mac, using Safari v.1.03.

[Talkfreelance]

Looks great to me, nice colours that flow perfect with each other. Very easy to navigate and loads fairly fast in my browser. Nothing more than needs to be done or improved. I'm not a fan of "splash" screens, they serve no purpose imo..but thats just me!