www.nicoleherfordphotography.com

[redqueenlady]

I have finally got my site up and going! Well its been about a week! Have almost 1000 hits already! I designed it myself! (my first shot too) I think I did a pretty good job! Check it out! give me some tips if you would! thanks

www.nicoleherfordphotography.com or www.nicoleherford.net

[d2frette]

The design looks nice. To me, it's unique. I'd prefer larger sample pictures, but that's just me.

Here are my suggestions to help improve your site:
- no need to say new photos coming soon
- You only need 1 contact email and consider displaying it in an image with no alt tag to keep bots from sending you spam
- you shouldn't have a hit counter on a professional services site, IMO. And, it increases each time I click certain pages. A true monitor of site traffic would be to track unique IP addresses
- calendar page is empty so add the link later when such page is online
- at least 1 page has a red background
- several pages need to have a better title tag (your title should ALWAYS have your sitename on it as the Title is what is used by browsers for Favorites)
- you will want to establish a heirachy for your content. Having everything at the root will get difficult to maintain
- on the home page, when I hover over the menu, the font goes bold. on the other pages that is not the case
- under photo galleries, you're missing a white line above families

[redqueenlady]

WOW Lots of things I DID NOT see! Thanks again! I will be fixing it up in days to come!

[d2frette]

Sure, a fresh set of eyes always helps.

[Outlaw]

Congratulations on the grand opening of your new site, Nicole! You've got a great start. A few things I would throw out there:

- I first notice how long your images take to load, and that would be because you are pulling in full-size images via your <img> tag and then using height= and width= attributes to limit them on the page. Consider resizing the images called with the <img> tag to the actual size they will appear on the page, then if you want to link to the full-size image, you can use an <a href> tag to make the image clickable up to the bigger size. For example, <a href="example-full.jpg" target="_new"><img src="example-small.jpg"></a>. This will create a link from the smaller picture to the larger when clicked on, and will make your page load much more quickly.

- Your color scheme doesn't seem to mesh well right now. http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/refer...us_color_.html (which I just found via TPF, thank you mates!) and others like it are good sources for complimentary color schemes.

- Your Gallery page and others require horizontal scrolling, even on my 1024x786 resolution setting, which is frowned upon. Try making the page to only need scrolling vertically.

I think once those issues are addressed, you will have a better idea of where you want to go with your site. I think the biggest issue right now is load times because of pulling the full-size images straight to the page; if I were a customer and had to wait that long just to view your gallery, I'd be on to the next site already. Logical navigation, clean presentation, and speed will get you customers any day. Good luck!

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