www.outlawphotography.net

[Outlaw]

Good evening, mates! Great to be back in TPF country.

We updated our web site to better reflect our move toward fashion portraiture earlier this year, and I wanted to poll the good TPF community on your opinions of the design and content.

Harshest critiques welcome, as always. Thank you for taking a look!

www.outlawphotography.net

[Casper]

I like it, especially the style and experience pages. Let us know if you get a good business response.

Steve

[Dobick]

My first thought was that the site functions well, and is easy to navigate.

The second thing that I went to was the gallery: I was overwhelmed by the amount of images. I ended up skimming past what turned out to be some of your best work (in my opinion) and had to go back to look at it. While that sounds like a good thing, I don't think that it is, because it would be very easy to not see them and skip right over. If I have a baby that I want photographed and I am looking for someone that can do the job, I want to see what work you have done in that department. You should think about categorizing the shots and maybe edit down to no more than 10 or 12 of your best in that category.

On the absolute plus side -- the viewer ran flawlessly and smooth, and I liked the transition speed.

[rott]

Whoa! Great design! It's super clean and fast... but... and here it comes...

My instant gut response when I clicked was that I was looking at a blog instead of a photography site. I hate splash pages as much as the next guy, but you definitely can't mistake a photography site for a blog if you have one. Besides, you can still have all your links there on the splash page, you'd just have to drop the paragraph and welcome.

Personal preference: I like centered navigation bars. I think it would work well to center yours (the "Home | Style | Substance ..." bars).

I really like your "Style" and "Substance" pages. The titles on the nav bar made me want to visit.

For me, however, the viewer didn't work so good. First off, my browser got resized, which for me is almost as bad as auto playing some elevator music. Then I got this:



I tried again and it worked. Great design on the gallery, it really shows off the images well... but ... the gallery design is quite different from the front pages. Both excellent, just different. Don't know how much that matters, except for brand recognition reasons.

And holy cow, 103 images!

The images are FANTASTIC. Big, bold, and no clutter on the gallery. AWESOME. I like how I get a teaser of the next image too. That's the type of site I love to see from a photographer. It's chunky -- a good chunky, but diverges from the clean, elegant feel of the rest of the site. Of course I know where I am when I go in there, and most of your viewers will too, but something about that feels off, you know?

[KeepsakeGirl]

well, i got the same error as noted above on Mac except i clicked NO and it eventually unfroze my browser and launched the viewer..

[Outlaw]

Hey all, thanks for all of the great responses! I appreciate y'alls feedback.

So far the response from clients has been great; it has definitely had an impact on our fashion portraiture bookings. Parents are calling, saying they love the photos on the site, and are booking shoots for their daughters and friends.

I agree with you guys on the gallery; it was honestly a "best I can do right now" option when launching the site. I've used AutoViewer, a freeware program, in the past for other sites, and it was a best compromise at the time. I'm working toward categorized galleries, hopefully better integrated into the rest of the site's designs.

I was considering setting up a separate "portfolio" site through a place like SoloModels.com, and letting that be my official gallery. Kind of separate the business site of outlawphotography.net with the art gallery of a solomodels site. Basically opening in a fresh window, like the current gallery, but directing to the solomodels gallery. Any thoughts?

Thanks again for the feedback! If you guys have any suggestions for a good Flash script or design for an inline gallery viewer, send them my way!