warren design

http://www.warren-design.com

portfolio site for freelance designer.

Nice looking but breaks one of the oldest usability rules by using "Mystery Meat Navigation" (MMN). It is not at all clear what to click on in this page. There are no text links and all the links are icons (a dot). If the artists buying audience are made up of lateral thinking puzzle fans then this is fine but if they are corporate and enterprise marketing execs or entrepreneurs who have hardly enough time in an 80 hour week to go to the toilet unclear, unobvious, obfuscated navigation is not the way to go.

The goal should be to take the visitors through the portfolio as quickly as possible for them to judge the type, qualty and style of the works and to contact the designer for a hire. MMN is a barrier to the search, a roadblock to solving the visitor’s problem, a virtual locked door. Building frustration as a first impression vs. wow this firm has great designs!

All the best,

Jay

It’s probably just me but when I visited the site the first time, i wondered where the portfolio was...I thought it was only the 3 images when you initially join the page.

Only smashingred’s reply told me I had missed something where I found that the dots were in fact links and not (as I thought) a pretty looking spacer above the nav.

Maybe I need to explore more

I also wondered why you decided to use a jpg for the logo as opposed to a PNG or GIF?

I like the simplistic design!

All the best,
Taff

great feedback. thank you. this art director (the owner of the portfolio) gave me this design and i just built the site for him. he wanted this type of navigation, but i am going to take your usability feedback and see if we can modify it to be less cryptic.

thanks

nice and clean.

hint: if you’d like to do more in the way of SEO, change two things:

- make the title tag in the portfolio section dynamic, i.e. use the project/client-name in the <title></title> as well
- use an html header (h1, h2, h3...) for the project titles, not <span class="collection_title">Lucite International</span>
(you could easily assign a css class to an h2 as well)

bmcneill,

All too often my clients come to me with preconceived designs, often they are based on emotion or "me-too" ideas. I won’t let them build something that I know will negatively impact their purpose.

It is my job to be an expert or at least more of an expert than them and tell them if what they want to do is a bad idea. That doesn’t mean that I shoot them down or belittle their ideas I just try to get at the heart of the project and make them see that if making sales matters then they should try it this way as this has been proven to move people through the sales process better. Advertising Agencies are the worst for "looks cool does nothing" or interfaces even Jack Bauer(Fox TVs "24") can’t figure it out".

Websites are marketing tools and marketing need to be the lane of least resistance (unless filtering unwanted prospects is part of the goal) for the target audience.

bmcneill,

looks clean and modern but I agree with the other recommendations given...
also, as a customer I don’t like that you make me waste my time "guessing" what
you do... the images are too small, even if I discover that the dots have content,
they are too small.

As I say, dont make me guess... tell me what you do.... BROCHURES dot dot dot (three examples)
WEBSITE dot dot (two examples of your work) ADS dot dot (more examples). This way I come in
click see what you do, if I like it I will contact you or bookmark you and if I dont like your work
I will leave and keep searching....

my 2 cents...

You should add validation of some sort to your form, or this could lead to problems in the future.