relaunched site www.robpackerphotography.com comments welcome

Hi everyone,
I have changed domain names and relaunched my photography website.

It’s at www.robpackerphotography.com

In the process there have been a few tweaks, some things that didn’t work are fixed. I admit my skills are probably heavily weighted more towards the photography than the web design/coding, but Modx Revo is easy to work with once you get your mind around the basics.

The site has big images & works best in FF. Haven’t been able to work out to successfully scale for smaller monitors, so suggestions would be appreciated there.

Comments & constructive critiques welcome - I’m still learning.

Thanks

Rob

After a quick look, I really like your photos and perspective The website is nice too, but I do have a couple of suggestions.

First, I would get some kind of logo for the topbanner - just your name set in nice curly font would do, if necessary. It may be just me, but having the site’s title set in the same font as the headings always makes me think of a canned template.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but reading small white text on a dark background makes me see stripes for the next few minutes. I feel so strongly about this that I will use Firebug to change the background and text color if the page is something I really need to read. This alone would be enough to prevent me from becoming a regular reader of your blog. You wouldn’t necessarily have to change your whole look and feel, but I would consider at least lightening up the background and darkening the text on your blog pages.

Also, when I click on "blog" and see a list of links to posts instead of summary texts, I’m scratching my head for a moment. If you’re using getResources for the blog, as I assume you are, changing these preview to use introtext would be very easy.

I’ve love to have some of your wallpapers, but the image size is WAY too small for my 22" monitor. Might you want to consider offering a larger size?

Just a few thoughts - nice job on the site.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I’m thinking about a suitable logo, but the distictive text idea as an intering is great. I’ve wrestled with the text size. If I make it larger, to suit those with big monitors (myself included) it becomes too big for those viewing in lower resolutions. There may be a way to solve this in CSS, but I’m still learning.

I see what you’re saying about the white text contrasted with the background - I’ve changed the text colour to reduce the contrast.

Thanks for the comment about the intro text - for some reason I had limited that to 50 characters ...

Bigger wallpapers? still working on the sharing / giving away & getting some return on the money poured into camera gear ...

The site is a work in progress - glad you like the photo’s!

Rob

Hi Rob,

I thought the website is pretty cool and neat. Where did you get the buttons for the social media sites from? I thought of having similar buttons for my site as well.

Thanks.
Elvin

Thanks Elvin,
I used the BookmarkThis snippet which has 36 x 36 icons. They seemed too big so I went looking through some free icon sites for 24x24 versions - there is no lack of choices.

Rob

Nice Page and wonderfull photo but i think page is to slow at loading for this data. Nearly 5 seconds to load a detail page is heavy. And you have an error with your "alt" title of your pictures on detail page. There is *pagetitle and not the real title of the page. I think you have an error in the tag it must be [[*pagetitle]]. You shoul also make your page xhtml ready its better for loading performance and searchengines. On your gallerypage you should not give all thumbnail images the id thumbnail. An id is only allowed one time on a page. Make it like thumbnail_123 with the page id at the end. And you should check your css file, i can see that you add style.css 4 times. This are all points who will speed up your page and make it better multi browser compatible. For xhtml you should look in firefox for the xhtml w3c addon. Its simple to use.

You have jquery 1.4 and 1.3 in your code but 1.3 can not be found. You should remove it because you have 1.4 added and runing.


But it is a nice page after this points. Hope you know that this are only tips for your site.

Thanks cschimanski,
that’s great feedback, very much appreciated. Some of the issues could be a result of developing the site over a number of weeks, in my ’spare’ time

I think the *pagetitle, thumbnail id and jquery issues are fixed. I’m working my way through the xhtml validation, but doing some heads-cratching over how to fix some of the issues.

With the multiple loading of css files I have tried to separate css and load it from resources as needed for different templates. Can anyone tell me if it would load quicker to simply save it as one css file, or even as one resource?

The site is hosted in Australia - that may impact the load time too.

Comments and feedback still welcome.

Rob

You dont´t need to split your css file, all css code in one file is better. But the problem was that the same file was loaded multiple on the side. What xhtml problem i think i can help if you wish. The errors i see were simple to handle.

How mmuch space does your site need at this time? I have my own server who is fast and i can give you some space and unlimited traffic for some € if you wish, write me an PM.

Greats
cschimanski

Thanks Elvin,
I used the BookmarkThis snippet which has 36 x 36 icons. They seemed too big so I went looking through some free icon sites for 24x24 versions - there is no lack of choices.

Rob






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