First off, let me say I really like the ideas of your site and the colors and realize how frustrating it can be to do web design if you're not completely familiar with how it all works together.
That said, here are a few suggestions / comments from one who's designed professional sites:
1. You use absolute positioning in your CSS. There are very few instances where this is a good idea. What this means to the user is that if a I increase or decrease my font size, everything gets out of position. This is especially true in your navigation bar. The text really should be within the background color instead of on top of a background image. That way, as the font increases in size, so does the bar behind it.
2. The side images (gray gradient) don't center under the header bar to me. The right one is inline with the right side of the header, the left one is not. I think this is a situation where you've used a standard width background inside the and the itself is too small. You'll probably have to increase the container to the width of the header + the size of the two gray bars. Then again, on some pages there is no gray gradients at all.
3. With regards to the gap in your background underneath your slideshow and above your contact information. Part of this is due to the absolute positioning. The other half of the problem is in the smugmugBlack...Moz_Other_Stretch.css file where they give the tag a margin-top value of 15 px. Not sure how to get around this as it appears to be a SmugMug file... On the "About Us" page, the background is completely missing for a good half of the page.
4. The biggest hurdle for me is the inconsistency of the different pages. Some are full width, some have full backgrounds, some are partial width, etc.. Also, on some pages, the navigation bar has all options and on the blog page for instance, there is no "Blog" option. Major navigation items should never change -- only become more detailed based on the current page. Changing major navigation features is confusing.
5. My final concern is that you have a lot of logos for other products in your site. There's the Smugmug logo, the Blogger logo in your blog page. While I like the integration of the blogger page, it seems that these additional logos confuse the perspective client with regards to who they are dealing with.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. I don't want to sound harsh, but I really feel that it's easy to miss the boat and not put the best foot (page) forward. Your photography is great and I think your website should emphasize that! |
