My first website!

C

charlottemarie_15

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Edit My Images
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After some really helpful advice and critique on this forum I thought I'd share my website with you! Its got my degree images which got me a first! I was looking at Fibonacci patterns in nature and creating my own patterns - thats in the abstract gallery. Its my first one, and it took 3 months to put together!

Please be honest, but hopefully you'll like it!

www.charlottemarie.co.uk
 
I like it actually, its very clean and easy to navigate. Nice neutral colours too. One thing I did notice, when I click "gallery" and then onto a category, the gallery list stays expanded. That might be by design though
 
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Aye at the minute its intentional as I'm still trying to work out how to get the gallery titles to show so it just helps the user remember which gallery they are in, but that will be changed soon.

Thanks though!
 
Wow. Really like it, love the clean look and layout. Need to ask, how did you do it!!!

Just started with clikpic and getting really frustrated as I want it to look very close to mu current one (in my sig) but cant seem to.

How did you get the news box above the pic on homepage, the green box on about page and well... lots of questions... was it a template?
 
The pics look very high quality and a good size @ 800 pixels. This is good.

However I would tone down those very intrusive watermarks as they make staying on the site unappealing.

The photos appear to be hosted by a third party provider rather than your own site - works OK but self hosted is more "pro".

I prefer static homepage than images that move & pan.
 
The top banner is way, way too deep. You should reduce it it no more that 100px deep. The majority of PCs sold at the moment have a screen height of just 800 px. Take out the browser bar and the windows bar and you only have about 600 px effective depth. On my screen the banner takes up 2/3 of my effective viewing area. I'm not interested in your name until I've seem your work and at the moment your work is invisible until I go looking for it. That's not good. I want Wow! and that's in your pictures, not in words on a banner.

Regards
Chris

EDIT

This is what your site looks like when I first open it.

38222638.jpg


Half of one picture visible when I first see the site. Not good in my opinion.
 
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cambsno said:
Wow. Really like it, love the clean look and layout. Need to ask, how did you do it!!!

Just started with clikpic and getting really frustrated as I want it to look very close to mu current one (in my sig) but cant seem to.

How did you get the news box above the pic on homepage, the green box on about page and well... lots of questions... was it a template?
Click to expand...

Your website looks very clean as well! Yeah mine is clikpic and based on the simple template, but I spent literally months (mainly as I'm new to web design) over riding all the custom style settings, its more playing around than anything, but its pretty easy to change the look completley.

As for the news, I went to other content and added a news article, then on the settings for it, made sure it was only showing on my home page, it was showing from my articles that i had set up, and that the max records was 1, so it only showed the latest blog. Also set the sort order to make sure its at the top. Then its just styling and preferences.

The small boxes were again, other content, text section, then the content. But here its important that the specific page is set up to main and extra column layouts, and that the small box content goes in the extra column, then its just colours and margin settings :)

If you need any help just give me a shout and I'll try to help, but the support ticket system there is very good.
 
charlottemarie_15 said:
Ok, changed the header, improved maybe?

www.charlottemarie.co.uk
Click to expand...
Better. But I think you're still wasting a lot of vertical space eg instead of

Charlotte Marie
Photography

make it

Charlotte Marie Photography

Move the three catagories below the picture and/or into the gallery tab. Lose the news banner it distracts and wastes critical vertical space, place it below the images.

This is what I can see ATM.

cm2d.jpg


It still lacks the Wow! that bringing the images to the top of the page would have.
 
Ha! I didn't realise it was a Clikpic site. You're very clever to make it look so different.
Some nice pictures there too.
Sorry for lack of critique, but as I said, I'm impressed with the changes you've made.
 
charlottemarie_15 said:
Ok, haven't got round to moving the three words and seeing that, but is this better do you think?

Thanks for the feedback :)
Click to expand...
This is what I see now

cm3mp.jpg


Spot on home page! Had a look around the other pages and they look clean and well presented as well. This is now a site that would catch my eye!

No phone number on contacts though? Maybe a 'pay as you go' mobile just for the business?

Good work :thumbs:
 
Just another thought. I would expect the Fine Art, Landscape and Nature headings to be linked to appropriate galleries and/or have the same categories (possibly plus others) in the Gallery tab. At the moment you are highlighting three categories but I can only access one (Nature). You need to create consistency in some way. If you highlight an area of speciality, such as Landscapes and I (as a customer) am interested in Landscapes I want to be able to access examples with one click. So it's best to hyper-link the heading directly to a gallery. At the moment the site highlights Landscapes but there is no dedicated link or Landscape gallery.
 
Hope I wasn't too abrupt! :D
 
No not at all I really appreciate it, its funny all the little things you miss when you're so hung up designing it!

And yes its a valid point, I think its because I just wanted a slogan to describe what I do, but tbh my landscape photography is still not up to scratch, maybe I should take it out for now..

It was supposed to somehow convey that I do fine art prints of landscapes, but ultimately nature, as I want to include some more underwater, wildlife and macro stuff soon, so didn;t want to be too specific..

Hmm, a thinker :)

Thanks for all the comments and advice everyone - big confidence booster! :)
 
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