Site Redesign evaluation please

[DanMcLinden]

Hi,

My spouse and I run a home-office doing wedding/event/portrait photography in our local area. We've redesigned our site using Front Page to manage along with some free-scripting from javascript and mootools. We've managed to replace frames with tables, add a sample gallery with lightbox in the front and dress up the look.

I'm less concerned about source-sloppiness (unless of course it breaks) than I am with basic usability for our target audience, basically brides on a budget and their parents. Not looking for design services but appreciate any suggestions or tweaks that will improve the look and feel of the site.

Redesign:
http://www.ciaobellaphotos.com

Old Site (not all image-links show up following the move):
http://www.ciaobellaphotos.com/ciaobellaphotos/SiteDesign2007

[almostbob]

If you can make the images used for buttons scaleable, the image will be viewable at all screen resolutions, it will take a little manual editing of the frontpage code.
Frontpage code is very overweight anyway, but that isnt an issue yet
frontpage assigne pixel measurements to all elements, that is usually a good thing for images, but when the image is a text used as a button it fails, on a different resolution than the one the layout was developed on the image becoimes either too small to adequately read the image text, or so large to become intrusive.
a small adjustment. image buttons have to behave like text buttons to be really workable

example only
developed on a 1024*768 screen
frontpage code <img src='weddings.gif' width='100' height='38'> scaleable

<img ssrc='weddings.gif' width='10%' height='5%'> [/code]

sort the preload img script urls so that the first image displayed by default is the first image loaded, will give the appearance of a faster page[icode]
<img ssrc='weddings.gif' width='10%' height='5%'>
[/code]

sort the preload img script urls so that the first image displayed by default is the first image loaded, will give the appearance of a faster page

[MidiMagic]

The old page drove me crazy with mouseovers. Thanks for getting rid of them.

[DanMcLinden]

The old page drove me crazy with mouseovers. Thanks for getting rid of them.

Thanks ! they were getting on my spouse's nerves too...

[DanMcLinden]

If you can make the images used for buttons scaleable, the image will be viewable at all screen resolutions, it will take a little manual editing of the frontpage code.
Frontpage code is very overweight anyway, but that isnt an issue yet
frontpage assigne pixel measurements to all elements, that is usually a good thing for images, but when the image is a text used as a button it fails, on a different resolution than the one the layout was developed on the image becoimes either too small to adequately read the image text, or so large to become intrusive.
a small adjustment. image buttons have to behave like text buttons to be really workable

example only
developed on a 1024*768 screen
frontpage code <img src='weddings.gif' width='100' height='38'> scaleable

<img ssrc='weddings.gif' width='10%' height='5%'> [/code]

sort the preload img script urls so that the first image displayed by default is the first image loaded, will give the appearance of a faster page[/QUOTE]

Will try, thanks for the tip ![icode]
<img ssrc='weddings.gif' width='10%' height='5%'>
[/code]

sort the preload img script urls so that the first image displayed by default is the first image loaded, will give the appearance of a faster page

Will try, thanks for the tip !

[jb1ker]

Hi Dan

Great improvement on your website. It's a lot better and more readible. Can I make a few sugestions?

You're using a central image (clickable to see the Gallery Image). It's 281.86 KB, this results waiting. You don't want to keep your visitors waiting. Try to stick under 100 KB. This picture has no ALT text. Try to insert one (for usability matters).

You're main header (Photography...) is a .gif. It's also missing an ALT text. For usability and indexing (Google) change it to normal text and style it with CSS.

I don't seem to find metatags on keywords and description. It's advisable to add this. However I found 2x title tags.

Your page is 12,31KB. That's quite heavy. Try to stuff your CSS in a separate file and stay under 7KB.

Do you want to know what's going on? Get a statistical program like statcounter. I use statcounter and it rocks for me.

Those are just a few hints. It was a big step forward but never stop improving.

All the best! With your business.
Jacob

[DanMcLinden]

Thank you very much for your advice... one question, I used TITLE instead of ALT on my images because of browser-compatibility. Should I use both ?

[jb1ker]

You can use both. You don't have to use both.
The alt is meant to be displayed when the image is missing, while the title is shown when you hover with the mouse pointer over the image. Designers don't seem to agree on usage, so whatever you think is best.

[jb1ker]

Check the following link. All the best.

[DanMcLinden]

Check the following link. All the best.

Thanks again, you have really been a great help ... I had always been paranoid about image-quality and forgetting to set the JPG-compression back for print-editing, stepping through the images and giving each a one-time 20% compression takes a lot of the weight off the site.

I've been leery of changing the GIF for our slogan because I wanted to maintain the font across browsers, but definitely looking into better use of tagging, CSS, etc.

Thanks Again and all the best to you as well ...