Tear this site apart Please!

[jhorsley]

www.beccamorris.com

How's the design? user friendlyness?

First impressions? is it professional enough?

Read the text, would you hire this person for photography?
What do you think of the photographer after reading about her.

Anything else I shoud add? or Delete?

Technicalities, Did I do ok putting a site together? You think It'll get googled alright?


I know the HTML version is hacky but I mostly just threw it together in about 10 minutes just to have it for search engine stuff, robots and sitemap thingy. I'm a newb at all this stuff really, The CSS is all jacked up. I"m not very good at it but I think I made it work alright.

I've racked my brain and stared at this site forever now and I still don't feel good about it but maybe it's because I stare at it. I compare it to alot of other really good sites and I just don't know. Any help from others would be really appreciated.

 

[mrandrei]

Seriously, your site is looking great. It's very obvious that you put too much time and effort in creating it. I like what you did in the images. What I least like about it is the welcoming page. I don't get door and window thingy. Why not make it a flash file?

Overall, Great job!

 

[jhorsley]

The door and window thingy.. thats supposed to be artsy.
I needed an HTML intro I thought so users could choose between a flash and html site. Notice I put the HTML link at the bottom so users wouldn't want to click on it unless they had to. I'd rather direct people to the flash site. I'm thinking of changing the image to more of a wedding photo just to attract the wedding crowd.

 

[Modern_Media]

From a visual standpoint - it's great. However, 90% flash sites are very hard to optimize. That being said, if your site is a niche market and you don't really need to push the marketing in your website - ignore what I said ;-)

It's a good looking classy site.

 

[adamblan]

You've built a beautiful gallery

Recommendations are to
1. drop the html splash page ( ! )
2. use swfObject.js to provide an html version of the site if flash is unavailable.

 

[ian]

way way way way way way too depressing, and no way I would use that person as a wedding photographer based on initial impressions.
The splash page is depressing, and serves absolutely no purpose, like adamblan said, I would get rid of it.
I would change the color scheme as well.

 

[mezangath]

I agree with most said about the page above. Drop the splash page from the beginning, serves no purpose and i don't really se it matching the rest of the site.

In other i think the design is good looking, it's alot of darkness and not many colors, this in contrast to the pictures comming to life with colorization when you hover over them looks very good indeed. You get the eye focused more on the specific parts that the mouse are. The contrast between these work well with my eyes (since i love dark pages) but if you want to announce yourself to a bigger crowd (like weddings and such) you might want to brighten it up a bit.

Alot of people find it annying when the pages are to dark, and since the standard monitors may not have the brightness needed to make them really see what they are viewing.

So in short, drop the splash page, lighten the page up a bit and stick to the contrasts between colorful and not colorful and i think you'll have a great page.

 

[Ennesus]

I agree with the comments above,

but i got something else, the navigation is realy small at the top,
you might thing about moving the navigation more vertical centered,
as example a previous button left from the image and a next button to the right.

The close and info button at the right top because that where the people gonna look if they look at the image.

thats my opinion, maybe you can use it.