First impressions of a new photography website I'm working on

July 26, 2006 5:44 PM

First impressions of an in-development website

I am working on a website for a friend who is a photographer.

Here is the link:

Sonia Paulino

I wanted to get some MetaFilterers opinions and feedback on the navigation, layout, and ease of use. Is the Image Gallery intuitive to use? What do you think? Any comments would be appreciated.

posted by dvjtj to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

Here are my impressions -

The purple fade is horrible and the background would look better plain black.

The lime green is a little too limey.

The font used for the main title is not what I would choose - it's a menu font.

You are rotating portraits on the main page - I would choose one of her best images and use that, since several weaker images appeared when I refreshed. She has some great photographs which would immediately grab the viewer.

I like the gallery interface and in general the site works.
posted by fire&wings at 6:02 PM on July 26, 2006

Pissed me off when you hijacked the size of my browser. Closed it and would not even consider looking at it again. I have a dual monitor set-up. I have my Firefox browser opened on one of the panels. As soon as I clicked on your link, it opened up the browser to both windows. I hate that.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 6:04 PM on July 26, 2006

Response by poster: Okay, thanks for the comments, if you are posting, could you also maybe include a link to a website you think is a standard for good design/usability for frame of reference? thanks..
posted by dvjtj at 6:07 PM on July 26, 2006

The good:

Nice w3c valid site. I was honestly supprised.

The ok:

"Sonia Paulino is optimized for viewing at 1024 x 768 screen resolutions and higher. It works best in modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, etc.) at full screen." < remove that. thats like wearing a flag your site that says this is still my first website and i think that people need to conform to what i say. the reality is no will actually read that, or change what they do because of it. dont waste words.br>
Add more SEO friendly content. Where is 'Los Angeles' ? Most people know where it is, but why not add 'California'. I would make the galleries and museums a page that has a list of museums she has had work at.

The bad:

Green on purple? Dark colors look funky on LCD's, and since people will be looking at the photos, I would suggest a lighter scheme. The black background and her black hair in the opening underexposed photo kinda screw with my eyes. I would remove the purple fade.

I agree with Fire&wings -- use her best photo on the front. Many of those images are not appealing, specifically:

http://www.timjaeger.com/sonia/images/random/nathaniel_clark.jpg
http://www.timjaeger.com/sonia/images/random/joe_brad.jpg
http://www.timjaeger.com/soniimages/random/grandma.jpg

I like the gallery as well.

Luckily the standards for photographer sites are pretty low.
posted by SirStan at 6:10 PM on July 26, 2006

First of all, I don't think this is a good case for using lightbox for the gallery. It takes me two clicks to view the full images, and it just feels slow and intrusive. Also, I'd bet that the majority of people never realize they can "scroll" via the arrows on the side.

For something like this I think something like flickr's interface would be better - ie thumbnails in a sidebar, with the full image shown in a main div via ajax calls. This means one click == one image and it will also feel faster to the user as they can look at the current img while the next image loads in the background.

There should be one consistent way to denote a hyperlink. I won't go all Nielsen on you and say blue underlined text only, but I think you should say "all links are green and bold" (for example) and stick with it. Some links are light grey, some are green, etc...so I found myself trying to click some green text at points where it wasn't a link.

If I'm at Photographs -> Portaits -> Couple, "Couple" should not be a clickable link as its the current page.

The logo should be a link back to "home", whatever that is.
posted by rsanheim at 6:11 PM on July 26, 2006

Browser hijacking is IE only.. FWIW. I like how you suggest using Firefox, but use features that are IE specific.
posted by SirStan at 6:11 PM on July 26, 2006

Also, I would recommend _Don't Make me Think_ by Krug, over any one specific web site to emulate. Its short, cheap and essential for usability and what constitues a good, simple design.
posted by rsanheim at 6:14 PM on July 26, 2006

Neat!

• Web developers nowadays tend to detest horizontal rules, but yours don't look awful to me.
• I'd would consider moving the pagination navigation in the gallery to above the photos, so that its closer to the other gallery navigation elements; since not all the subcategories have pagination, I initially didn't see it when I went to one that did.
• I agree that the purple fade is not particularly attractive. The continuing adoption of CSS based layout seems to have made solid boxes of color cool again.
• The green of the focused element in the main nav bar is just light enough to make the text inside slightly difficult to read

posted by gsteff at 6:19 PM on July 26, 2006

Also, if this is a promotional website, you might want to consider using a dark-on-light, instead of light-on-dark color scheme. Its just happier. This is admittedly a very subjective point though.
posted by gsteff at 6:21 PM on July 26, 2006

I think the background is too dark.
The green is too fluorescent.
Please, please don't make it automatically resize to fullscreen. I have a 24" widescreen monitor and it makes your site look bad and it annoys me greatly.
Lastly, a pet peeve of mine: don't put a "best viewed with..." disclaimer. The site should be best viewed with any reasonable modern browser at any resolution, etc.
posted by disaster77 at 6:56 PM on July 26, 2006

Pissed me off when you hijacked the size of my browser. Closed it and would not even consider looking at it again.

Ditto. That's unforgiveable. Fix that and I'll look at it again.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 7:02 PM on July 26, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks for the comments on the background and resize..I fixed that, will fix the footer, and figure out a better background color scheme.
posted by dvjtj at 7:11 PM on July 26, 2006

I'm using Safari 2.0.4, and your site insists on relocating the browser window to the upper left hand corner, forcing me to manually move it out from underneath my Dock (which I have pinned to the left of my monitor). Even worse, it relocates every time I click on one of the navigation menu bar items. Click, move, click, move, click, ARGH! Frankly, if I encountered the site under normal conditions I'd immediately give up and go elsewhere.
posted by RichardP at 7:33 PM on July 26, 2006

Hmm... I think the earlier revision of the style sheet was still in my browser cache. Flushing the cache fixed the problem.
posted by RichardP at 7:37 PM on July 26, 2006

Some notes:

1) Hosting is slow. A 79k image shouldn't take long to load.

2) There is no legitimate reason (that I can see) why the site shouldn't be able to scale horizontally in size and not make me scroll left/right..

3) Not a huge fan of the purple fade, I think solid black would actually look nice

4) Maybe tone down the green a bit - it makes the headers a bit hard to read when they're selected.


Here's a photography site I did not design, but I host: clicky... There are things about it I like, and things about it I might consider changing.. but maybe it will give you some ideas...
posted by twiggy at 7:49 PM on July 26, 2006

For the organization of the directories, I would simplify:
(1) portraits, (2) documentary, and maybe (3) collaborations.

From there, Portraits is nicely subdivided into projects. But I'd add the documentation of her own gallery shows should go within the gallery for that project. See how this artist has thumbnails for the images, and then excerpts from the installed show.

Freelance and Fun are an organizational mess, which is why I think they should be merged into a single "documentary" division, and then subdivided into projects (LA Summer Games, Art Performances, etc.). Summer Games has too many images... there is no need to put every image she delivered to the client up. She should edit down to one page of thumbs for each project. And rather than diminishing the interesting documentary work she's done of her friends by calling them snapshots, I'd give those a project name and have it be a documentary category.

Any images that are purely fun for friends and family should be removed to Flickr or Livejournal -- they have no place in a professional portfolio site.

I'd consider using close-up details of the images as thumbs or larger thumbnails... at the size they are currently, they don't look interesting enough to click. Some of them need brightening so that the lighting is more consistent.

I liked looking at the images at their full size, and my tendency would be to start at one and keep clicking the right arrow to see them all till I got to the end. So at the end, it would be great if the "close window" button was where the right arrow used to be, so I don't have to scroll down in order to change to the next project.
posted by xo at 8:32 PM on July 26, 2006

Thank you for removing the browser-resizing javascript.

First impressions?

• the font used for "Sonia Paulino" top left is cheesey and unprofessional looking
• the lime green is too strong and distracting
• the flash for the galleries is unecessary and confusing

Just put up the graphics in regular HTML pages would be my vote.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 8:50 PM on July 26, 2006

Also, what xo said.

I'd consider using close-up details of the images as thumbs or larger thumbnails... at the size they are currently, they don't look interesting enough to click.

Thumbnails don't have to be scaled versions of the original. Zoom in and crop on some interesting detail.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 8:52 PM on July 26, 2006