I have just put up my first website. If you are so inclined take a look and tell me what you think. Be honest. I can take it. Really :)
Site looks great. Easy to browse through.
Nice work on the bowls. From the look of the shop photos you've been biten pretty hard with the turning bug.
I love to see photos of someone else's shop. It makes me feel better about my own (not meant as a put down, I'm just glad to see I'm not the only one with piles of shavings, blocks of wood, and tools lying around where ever they were last used).
Great job. Keep posting.
JD
Opinions and personal preferences, one and all.
The color scheme is not optimal, especially for anyone who's colorblind.
The text color does not have optimal contrast against the background.
The background image at the upper right is too opaque beneath the text. The background image needs to be much fainter when under text.
The "Created with Sandvox" ad text is much too prominent. Especially when placed near the turning thumbnail image . It is advertising required to be on the page but it can be placed in a much more reserved location and avoid confusion over whether it is a caption for the turning image.
If the company has any customer events and has a schedule for that event, sales convention, class, tradeshow, art fair, etc., it's great to have a picture of the customer representative on the schedule page.
These days, any reference to a location for commerce, sales convention, class, tradeshow, art fair, etc., should have a map link, googlemaps, mapquest, etc..
The "About" page is also a great place for a photo. In this type of site a great place for a "work-in-progress" series of photos. Raw log to finished piece. Or the artist pictured while working, teaching or relaxing.
On the gallery pages, I don't understand the order of pieces. Are these sorted as the date produced? Usually expected to have like items together. Reasonably sorted now but that also highlights items "out-of- order".
Thumbnails on gallery pages usually do better as cropped to one of three sizes, landscape, portrait or square. The slight variances in thumbnail size don't add anything to the layout.
Large detail images should also be cropped and re-sized to a standard size for the chosen display page size. Landscape, portrait or square.
The light green background doesn't sell the items for me, personal preference. It doesn't look expensive and/or highlight the object either on the gallery pages or the detail pages.
Backgrounds on thumbnails can be made consistent if more attention is paid during the photo shoot. Try to achieve consistent gradients with matching horizons or all "white" backgrounds.
Some thumbnails need processing, for instance, Cherry Bowl #106 - 13x3 inches - $70, is too dark.
A few minor typos like the missing dollar sign on "Box Elder #48 8x3.5 inches - 70" both on gallery and detail pages.
Keep consistent names across site. Gallery 2 is also called "Natural Edged Bowls" in different locations.
Gallery 2, "Natural Edged Bowls", has bowls that are not natural edged.
I "get" the leaves for the "prev-next" buttons but they're not to my taste. If I used a non-intuitive icon like these I would include text for prev, next and return. I'd probably just get better navigation icons.
Next buttons usually should loop to first photo from last photo.
Shop photos need adjusting or should be re-taken using HDR bracketing methods. Easy to do in any photo app and any digital camera using a tripod. Take three shots, one dark, one medium and one light exposure and combine the three for better exposure than you can achieve with a single shot. Many tutorials and special apps and plugins for HDR available on the web.
Gallery pages should include and have marked a few items that have been sold.
The "contact us" link at the bottom right of the page is the correct size on the front page and show page but much too large on most other pages like the gallery pages and detail pages.
The "contact us" link should not be being used for general commerce. Create a order form page or create submit links on each detail page which will create emails with the product in the subject line. Or go to a e- commerce layout with shopping cart. You can then add paypal, google, then finally credit cards when business supports it. Shopping carts still work well for cash customers to build orders and using user authentification for returning clients to submit re-curring orders.
The "shows" page could use a little more detail. Why is Ted at the show, will he be available the entire posted time. Is this just selling finished pieces or demonstrating?
The "shop" pages don't have any photos of stock. Many buyers appreciate knowing the process. Photos of logs, wood stock, turning blanks and other works in progress. If possible, all pieces should be photographed before and after to build a wood species catalog and show raw to finish color variations.
On the "shop" pages especially or any page where the header text is long the header text is being displayed over the background leaves on the upper left. This could be a browser display variance, I'm using firefox. Still, it could be fixed for all browsers easily with this simple of a layout.
The web design software you're using is creating pages for the gallery details that cause the browser to center the page and cause each prev and next page to jump around. This is a common "slideshow" problem that can be fixed any number of ways, from frames to CSS/HTML layout to using crop framed pictures all the same size. Clicking prev or next should cause the product picture only to repaint. There should be no other movement on the web page between page views optimally, including the "contact us" link at the bottom.
Slideshows are nice for gallery pages. Timeouts should be including so people don't leach bandwidth by leaving the page up in their browser for hours.
The gallery pages are longer than all other pages (the shop page may also grow to be longer). Better results might be obtained by creating front pages of best photographed works and put less striking work on back pages. Keep each page non-scrolling within your chosen display size. The issue is first impressions. Pick a display page size and create pages for that size 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc.. When running at low resolution (1024x768) on the "gallery 1" page I see two rows but not the caption of the second row. The best works should be within these first two rows and if 1024x768 is chosen as display page size then the layout should be adjusted to include the captions of the second row to be displayed at that resolution. At 1600x1200 I see 4 rows with captions so this should be the maximum page size if 1600x1200 is picked as the default display page size. (The layout will actually be a few pixels shorter than the actual resolution to account for the lost pixels used by the title bar, status bar and edges of the browser window.)
At worst, the layout of every page on the site should look perfect at a specific display size in a specific browser on a specific OS platform with no horizontal or vertical scroll bars present when displayed full- screen at the chosen default display resolution.
At best, the layout should be perfect for every page at every size in every browser on every platform and be adjusted or served "custom size" pages so no horizontal or vertical scroll bars appear when displayed full- screen at any resolution.
At very best on long page areas like the gallery and shop pages it is great to have a selection box for number of thumbnail images displayed defaulting to a non-scrolling page length but allowing someone to choose to display the full gallery on one page if desired or a separate index page.
Saving bandwidth, removing vertical scroll bars and maximizing first impression I'd probably go with smaller front gallery pages with more or deeper galleries. First level gallery page(s) would have the best photographed works.
Possibly think about jumping randomly into the detail "slideshow" from the gallery menu link and then allowing a link to the gallery index page from detail pages (as exists now on detail page to existing gallery page).
If bandwidth permits, larger detail shots would be nice and should exist as a link on existing detail pages, 4x or more of existing detail size. The existing detail image size is adequate and might be slightly adjusted based on layout design changes.
If bandwidth permits, more detail shots would be nice. Inside and outside. Source raw wood. Work in progress shots. Rotating static views using panoramic shots, tripod and lazy susan display stand. Movie made using lazy susan display stand.
Change the name of the galleries to subset names, natural edge, maple, etc., rather than 1 and 2, 1 implies better product than gallery 2.
Normally you'd create at least two email accounts so the website published account is only used from the website and all other email correspondence is through the alternate email account. This will reduce the amount of real business mail mixed with spam to the email address scraped from the website. Or use html forms which submit to PHP or other server side emails to hide email addresses. Then some people place un- obfuscated email address as graphic image on site. Easy to read but much harder to scrape by script. Can't be cut and pasted or right clicked but you can use javascript to launch an email link when an email image is clicked. For most small businesses I just create two or more accounts, publish addresses and deal with the spam using a filter program.
Joe,
Thank you for your suggestions. It sounds like you have built a few pages in you life. Some of what you mention I have already considered and will probably incorporate as I further develop the pages (a page about the process of turning, a page for contacts and ordering, dividing galleries into smaller sections, etc.) Some of your other comments I have not considered. Some of the pages were done quickly just to get the site up and online. I have a lot of people making inquiries.
A few of the problems are limitations of the software I am using. Either that or Sandvox will do things that I don't yet know. This is my first stab so to speak at using Sandvox to build a set of web pages. For instance I don't know how to use any use anything but their standard backgrounds, yet. Also, I have tried to move "Created by Sandvox" to another location with no success. I hate to write code and the version of Sandvox that I am using has very limited code writing abilities. I may have to suck it up and upgrade to the Pro version.
One thing you said I don't quite understand:
I cannot find what you mean by this statement. Originally I had pages for more various types of turnings and one of the pages was named "Natural Edged Bowls". I decided at the last minute to change to two galleries until I can sort out how I really want to define each type. I thought I had changed everything back to Gallery 2. As I reviewed the pages just now I don't see what you are referring to. Please let me know where you see this problem.
Also, when I view the pages (on my Macintosh using Safari) the contact us links are all the same size on every page. I didn't realize that some browsers would interpret something like this differently than others.
Some things I think I may be stuck with unless I use different software. For instance I don't like the leaves as prev-next buttons either but each page type in Sandvox has its own predefined scheme.
Thanks again for the comments. I will be using many of your suggestions in future updates. Ted
I like looking at other shops as well. I thought about cleaning up the place before taking the photos but I didn't have the time that day. So I took them anyway. Besides my dad always said that messy workshops were a sign of genius :) I may clean up the place for some future shots.
Thanks, Ted
Cleaning up !? You`d want to see mine.
Adding to Joe's comments
Totally agree on the Right-hand side background, its intrusive behind the text. On the text itself , with many these days having larger monitors at higher resolutions your text can look a little small, and if its hard to read, they're gone Maybe consider a couple of points bigger. (I am looking on a 1280 screen ) Also this background is not consistent on all pages
"Created with Sandvox" should be at the bottom of the page at the very least if not gone altogether. If you cant get rid of it Make the hyperlink open in a new page. NEVER open directly to an external page, they are your visitors and you want to keep them, if they go off site the chances are they will forget to come back.
For the Galleries when you open the thumbnail to the full image, apply a little salesmanship to the page show them the product, then tell them the price ( Picture first , price second). If you Tell someone a price and it seems high to them they 'turn off', they don't care how good the product is, let alone what it is. But if you describe this magical piece of turning, one of a kind, rarer than priceless, you can hook them into what you have, they fall in love with it, and price becomes of little importance - you've sold it
When I accessed the site form your link the redirect of URL seemed to take quite a while, it may be worth looking at, if you can I would suggest your own hosted domain and no redirect
Loose your email from the pages as soon as you can, create a GIF image with the email in it. I know it makes it a little harder to contact you but if they can't be bothered then they probably aren't a customer. By using a GIF it will prevent your email from being harvested, so it will be useful for many more years, before your swamped with SPAM or your email address is blocked by others due to the SPAM that others spoofed as being you.
And one last thing you could put something at the bottom of the page to indicate the end of the page, often this is where the link to the copyright notice you have goes :) This helps users who tend to use the scroll wheel on a mouse and who don't look to see if there is a scroll bar
If you like any more criticisms I am sure I can find some, but I will probably need to search :) Hopefully what I have said though will help you develop a great site, there is nothing worse than getting 3 years down the line and having to start again because the method you chose can't cope with your hobby. ( The main website I run has had 4 major iterations, its latest took 6 month and 4000+ pages to be changed)
have fun
This is preemptive advice. I read the status line and URL location bar while browsing. The gallery2 menu link and the list icon, photoListBGImage.gif, on the gallery 2 detail pages, both point to a dir or page named natural_edge_bowls (index.html). When you hover over the "list" icon on a detail page you see "natural_edge_bowls" in the status line and when you click you're on gallery2. I would not consider this "broken" yet as long as you don't add hover text "natural_edge_bowls" to the list icon but I would add the correct hover text to all icons at some point. I would consider it "more proper" or "easier to manage" if the page/dir name and the menu link name were closer to the same name. If I save a detail page from the website I can't tell where it's from by it's name.
That was probably an optical delusion on my part, late night and all, I didn't read the page html. Caused by the proximity of the contacts line to the text in each of the pages. The contacts line just looks too big, especially on the gallery pages. It's larger than the main page text and menus but has less importance. Unless you were using it for commerce contact. A link from the detail page for contact, a separate page or an order system would make more sense for commerce.
Ted, I like your site, nice colors, easy to read, easy to navigate.
Randy
In message , randyswoodshoop writes
you might like to take a look at your signature, as your URL is missing something :
Try this one
Thanks John
Randy
In message , JD writes
I had actually figured it, just wasn't sure if Randy had :)
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