I recently bought Dreamweaver and taught myself to use it so I could design a website for my photography. I've started my own small business mostly so I can just make money to buy my own gear. So far I've booked two jobs and am pretty excited. There's still a little bit of work that I need to do touching up the site and stuff but it's more or less finished. I have run into one problem though. In internet explorer when you click on the thumbnail it doesnt open up in another window. I haven't encountered this problem with any other browser though.
It would be rgeat to see a picture on your home page
When I go in your portfolio, and click on a thumbnail, your regular page goes to some funny thing and says [object Window]
For your customers, I think it would be nice if you could somehow link to your pictology site and then they only have to enter teh event number. I have no idea how this could happen though.
Well, last time I did this, I got ripped a new one, but here goes.
I love the colors, the layout is pretty intuitive and the photography is very good. The problem with your thumbnails is in your javascript coding. The borders around the thumbs are the default link/visited/hover links and do clash a bit with your color scheme. I would say you have a nice start, but there are a few suggestions I would make.
The fonts appear to be a mishmosh of Copperplate and Times New Roman. The Copperplate title works for me, but the body of the site could be in a more appealing font. The fonts are also TOO BIG IMHO. The navigation is OK, but you do have to jump through a lot of hoops to view the images in your portfolio.
You have a good start on a decent site, just needs some tweaking.
Thanks for comments. I'm trying to get that problem with the javascript worked out as we speak and with regards to the pictology, as far as I know is not possible. oh well
FWIW, you may want to avoid javascript altogether. Some people may have their browser settings to block javascript. You could accomplish basically the same thing by using a target="_blank" reference in your link.
Edited to emphasize misquote further down... I never said "many" people block javascript. The point is to design a site that is viewable by as many people as possible.
Site looks good. I like function over form so you've got it nailed in that regard. Color scheme is elegant. Lays out perfectly in firefox.
I don't like the gray rectangle behind the left menu. I don't like the gradient on the title - should be the same straight red as everything else.
Sites that pop-up external windows suck. If you must approach it that way, resize the spawned window to the exact dimensions of the image being displayed or else slightly bigger with a black background. Preferabbly just display the large image in the same browser window AND MOST IMPORTANTLY never make your visitor use their back button. Put nav links in to get around.
edit: who the hell blocks javascript? activex sure, java well maybe, but javascript?
JavaSCRIPT is not blocked by default by any browser. Do not confuse someone saying 'many people block it' with more than a handful of people ever visiting your site having it disabled. And even those would get prompted to turn it on.
One wonders how people who block Javascript are navigating the DPC menus...
JavaSCRIPT is not blocked by default by any browser. Do not confuse someone saying 'many people block it' with more than a handful of people ever visiting your site having it disabled. And even those would get prompted to turn it on.
One wonders how people who block Javascript are navigating the DPC menus...
DPC might have alternative for menu, usually we someone develop a professional website, developer keep in mind about this scenario and its failover. e.g. if you have gmail account just disabled JavaScript, you would see that gmail still works because they display gmail in html form with no JavaScript in it.
Not only will the "target=_blank" method will work, it will work in any browser. Although technically it may be on the "no longer valid" list, it still works fine and all browsers are backwards compatiable.
If this were a site that contained dynamic data and was pushing the technology edge, I might consider a different option. However, the site being what it is, just use it. You will certainly have less problems than with javascript.
I user explorer and got a javascript error as well.
Nice site so far, in addition to fixing up the site I think a little more post processing of your images might not be a bad idea.
For example I quickly played with one of your images in PS to see if I could improve the colors a bit. Hope you don't mind. I was trying to make the grass a little greener, the sky a little bluer, and the red reflection a little less. Just 10-15 minutes worth of PS work.
The javascript isn't working because the format you're using is invalid.
If you really want to assign a javascript function to a href - and I'm not convinced that that is in any way a good idea - you'd need to do it as an onclick event, and you should really be using quotes around the data. Bear in mind that javascript-only based links are frowned upon from an accessibility point of view.
You could probably get away with either an onclick event or a target="_blank" reference and be legal XHTML transitional.
In any event, I'm confused as to why you would want the images to open in a seperate window, as it can be a very annoying thing for a website to do to assume that you want a new window. If I wanted a link to open in a new window, then I'd right click on it and choose the option that makes it do so, I'd rather that the website didn't make that choice for me, ta very much.
Other than that, the webpage as a whole -
I personally would prefer a sans-serif font.
It would be nice if the contact page had a contact-me form on it. Most web providers allow for this, or it's fairly simple to add your own. It's far better to allow the user to complete the whole "contact" experience without having to leave the website and write an email.
It'd be nice to have a (small) photo on every page, to show off. The front page, for example, has a lot of text for a photo site.
Where you do have image-based links, be sure to include the element border="0" within your A tag, so that the horrible blue border doesn't appear. If you want a nice border, you could style your img with style="border : 1px solid black; padding : 2px;"
I would say well done but the menu systems annoy me a tad, ok i'm a brit and its like being in the U.S. ordering a breakfast and getting option after option of breakfast for example. drop down menu's like hte outlook 200 style ones might help in this instance. Hope thats not too nit picky...
P.S. You can now remove the "- Make a Website" from your 2006 goals list :0)
If you are using php, dump spawning child windows and just call the same page again with the parameter of whatever picture you are opening. Check one of my sites out here, everything happens within one page. It is one of the great things about php.
Look at the nav links at the bottom of the journal entries. The button sends the parameters for what entry to pull up (or photo in your case) and a hidden 'flag' so the page knows its to display a new entry or just do some default thing for the initial view. You could do the same thing w/o forms using onclick().
I recently bought Dreamweaver and taught myself to use it so I could design a website for my photography. I've started my own small business mostly so I can just make money to buy my own gear. So far I've booked two jobs and am pretty excited. There's still a little bit of work that I need to do touching up the site and stuff but it's more or less finished. I have run into one problem though. In internet explorer when you click on the thumbnail it doesnt open up in another window. I haven't encountered this problem with any other browser though.
Have you tried picking up a book on HTML? I think that you could satisfy your creative needs a lot better that way although I've never tried the program you're talking about to create a web page.
Either way, the page does what it's supposed to do...showcases your work and gives the viewers a way to contact you and some information about you.
I recently bought Dreamweaver and taught myself to use it so I could design a website for my photography. I've started my own small business mostly so I can just make money to buy my own gear. So far I've booked two jobs and am pretty excited. There's still a little bit of work that I need to do touching up the site and stuff but it's more or less finished. I have run into one problem though. In internet explorer when you click on the thumbnail it doesnt open up in another window. I haven't encountered this problem with any other browser though.
Two things that can help you out. First if you only want a single space in Dreamweaver, you need to press alt-enter at the end of a line. Otherwise it defaults to double spacing every line which is a pain.
Also to get your thumb in a diffrent window, you have the option of changing that when you create the link. You will see a drop down box at the bottom of the screen that will allow you to change it to -blank - same ect... That will fix your thumbnail problem.
I'm totally not digging the centered text on the front page. Centered text to me looks amateurish if not down in VERY small chunks (read that as headlines).
Also on the main protfolio page, left justify that text and put photo thumbs next to each category.
