Website Critique, please

[Jeffrey Sipress]

I have not been too active here for a couple of months, as the hot summers in So CA make me just stay home and not too many images are being made. So I used the time to re-design my website. Learned some new presentation techniques and finally added the Africa Gallery. It's simple, and hopefully, effective. Your thoughts and comments are welcome. Thanks.

My Photo Site (http://jeffreysipress.com)

Jeffrey

[Fabs Forns]

Well done, Jeffrey, easy to navigate and simple. Beautiful images :)

I do miss an "about" page, maybe because I'm curious. I think it helps to tell a bit about yourself to put together with your work.

Congrats and good luck!

[Chris Ober]

Lots of good photography there. It's is simple and easy to navigate but...

The all Flash navigation and display is too much IMO. Sorry, I don't really care for Flash and think it's too overused these days. It should be used in little bits at a time and only where it makes a difference. I don't want to see the progress of it Building Layout, Loading Data, Loading image....I want it to just be there when I click it.

The all-centered text and elements is very 90's.

You're going to get more SPAM having your email in the mailto: tag and I would change the color from the green or better yet, have a form to email you on the contact page so you don't have to have your address displayed anywhere for search engines and spammers to crawl through.

[Phil Colla]

Your photography is excellent, its a real pleasure to view your images. I'd like to see captions alongside the images however. I was browsing your Utah stuff and, while I knew where many of the shots were taken some are unknown to me. At least the state, and a brief mention of the subject, would be great if you don't want to disclose to your viewers the exact locations.

Great stuff!

[Doug West]

My one suggestion would be to resize your images so they fit on the screen.
Right now, roughly half of your images in your slideshow are off the screen,
requiring people to scroll down. They might even miss your writeup at the
bottom.

Doug

[david cramer]

Your work is quite good and is well represented. I agree with sizing your images, at least the portrait orientation ones, to fit on the screen (I think the average screen size is still 17" for most non-photography/graphic folks). I'd also suggest you consider reducing the number of images, as overload sets in at some point. They are all quite good, so I don't know how you'd decide which ones! Personally, I like the flash setup, and it flows well.

[WIlliam Maroldo]

I think your photographs are excellent. I don't know how you came up with your website, and I would be very interested how you came up with it. I have a few observations..
1. Very poor choice of font. Font size much too large, maybe use verdana and 10pt or so, not bold typeface.
2. thumbnails should be smaller, no more than 100x100px
3. Thumbnails strip at bottom or side, never top
4 The image you are showing should pretty much be allowed to be viewed with as few distractions as possible. All attempts should be made that viewer not use scroll bars. i.e. something like 800x600 max size. (assuming there are very few people that view web pages smaller that 1024x768. Your website name and logo don't have to be at the top.

4. xml Flash slideshow V3 has much better layouts that can be found at their website. You can use mouse overs for image information, etc.)
5.Navigation bars much too large and distracting, should be at bottom, smaller, and need no border
6. If you are using dreamweaver (xml Flash slideshow V3 is a dreamweaver extension), I don't understand why you are using tables( very old technology) and not using divisions(layers). It is preferred that external CCS should be used for page element placement.
7. File size of images: I can't tell, but I'd guess something like 200kb, which is too large and takes too long on dial-up modems. This is primarily a real problem for a large number of images, people aren't going to wait.
If you have any questions feel free to ask.
regard~Bill

[Juan Carlos Vindas]

Qué belleza!
Wow, your web site is something else! colors and sharpness are predominant in your work which is great!
Thank you so much for inspiring me!