Tips for my website?

[Silver]

Should I just have one main gallery or should I separate them into categories?  Just wondering what would be the best for potential clients.  I know I enjoy looking at all the pictures.  But I am trying a boudoir shoot soon, and I don’t think maybe I can showcase it with the rest of the portraits?

http://www.brandiclairephotography.com

I’m still working on a lot of it.  Please be nice about the pictures.  I don’t charge people, and they are my friends who volunteer for me, or family.

[iliketag]

I can’t even get it to load…

[nairbynairb]

It’s too big in my opinion. A lot of people these days use monitors with lower screen resolutions so they’d have half of the picture on their screen and would have to scroll down to see the rest.

When I browse photography websites I like to see different categories… That’s just my preference!

If you’re going to include your boudoir on your site, I think it should be separate so people know what they’re getting when they click on the link that leads them there.

 

Good luck 🙂

 

[iliketag]

Ok, after I saw Nairby’s post I finally got it to load.

That being said, it took WAY too long to load. And I have a 6 core desktop I’m on right now…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/technology/impatient-web-users-flee-slow-loading-sites.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

This article details how long people will wait for a webpage to load… you could be losing clients based solely on poor load times. Do you really want that?
Your page isn’t overly “busy” with distractions but your full resolution images are causing it to crawl. Even the photo stream at the bottom takes it’s sweet time. You need to compress your images. Also, if you post high res images, it’s much easier for them to be subject to theft.

I agree with Nairy about the categories. Not only is it easier for a client to see a portfolio based on their wants, but it doesn’t force me to look at portraits mixed with images of lemurs and kitty cats. (I would lose the cat photo, honestly. It’s not bad but it definitely doesn’t wow me.)

You need to get to work on your about me section, pronto. Add a headshot or family photo – something personable so that it’s easier to relate to you. Having a blank about section is a good way to have a potential client, even early on like this, go the route of another photographer because they feel that other person doesn’t have anything to hide.

[JimC]

I like your photos. The web site is a little rough though.

I’ll echo others. It runs very slowly. All the cool scripting and animation and whatnot being used is really slowing it down, to the point that people aren’t going to hang out. The more established photog down the road has a site that loads instantly. You need to be as good as he is.

Advice: download Google Chrome. In the menu, go to Tools => Developer Tools. It does a lot of really cool website analysis right from your browser, and can troubleshoot issues. Using the dev tools in Chrome, I found SEVERAL significant scripting problems that are slowing you down. Even with most of the site cached I’m still getting load times of 16+ seconds on your gallery page, which only shows me 9 images. By contrast, a very sloppily put together website I built using WordPress (of all things!) for my car club has a load time of 4.36 seconds for a gallery with 48 images of similar dimensions to yours, and I cleared my cache before running that test.

I can totally sympathize with the peril of having to wear multiple hats in running a small business. Your passion is photography, not web design. I’d never expect someone devoting their life to photography to also be able to carry a conversation about the pros and cons of ruby on rails or to find any entertainment from a site like stackoverflow.com. (Bonus points if you can define what “stack overflow” means without peeking on Google.) Because it’s not your area of expertise, it’s easy to fall into despair, especially with those awful “drag and drop to build your website” tools that companies like Wix (who appears to be your provider) host.

My advice is to start over on the site. Your options are as follows, 1: Hire a programmer to create a site for you, 2: learn a bunch of coding and re-do it yourself, or 3. start over using WordPress as a content management system. The best bang for your buck for getting your site up quickly is that third option. You can actually do some really neat things with wordpress, and I know a good number of photogs who use it for their sites. No, it’s not as professional as having a custom, purpose built site, but it’s infinitely better than what you have now. The “build your own site” tools create extremely poor code, and a website using them is going to be so horrid to get through that people will leave it before they can wait for it to load. 16 seconds for all your assets to load (when half of them are cached) was pathetic in 2002. Today, it’s unheard of. This must be fixed.

[Worst Case Scenario]

It was slow but interestingly it didn’t seem too slow for me. And I live in rural UK where 2mbs is the best speed and I often get bored waiting for the main YANOF page to load.
The whole look of the site is very harsh on your eyes.
Most of your shots look overly contrasty and the colour scheme does nothing to compliment them.
Assuming everyone sees the same  images on the front page, I got some okay but contrasty  fashion/portraits front and centre and then a slide bar at the bottom containing  several shots including a snap shot from a zoo and a picture of someones cat.  Nothing shouts amateur more than a picture of your cat! So, as for adding boudoir shots, fine as long as they replace the snap shots.

[Silver]

Thank you for the tips!  What is the best size for pictures to be shown on web?

I will work on my website.   Its been a headache for me for a while.  I’ll work on the contrast on my photos.  I’ll get rid of my animal pics  LOL ( I laughed out loud about the kitty cat remark)   I actually forgot they were there.  Yeah tigers,lemurs and kitty cats (oh my) dont say “portrait photographer”.

Is resizing and compressing the same thing?  If they are not, which is better to showcase my pics?

I have tried to read up about it, but alas. . . .  its a lot of info.  I’ll get rid of the scroll bar and I’ll try to resize the whole website.  I was gonna wait, but maybe it would be better for me to invest in a custom design right now.   I had a vista print site before,  and it was the worst and it would make my pics look cloudy (maybe I tried to compensate by making my photos overly contrasty?)

Another question for you guys.  I am writing up a business plan and doing some local market research.  I want to be able to offer my clients professional prints if they so choose and/or a digital disk/usb for a fee.  How would you price out the prints? Of course I would like to make a profit on the prints, but I don’t want to scare them away by the prices? Is there a rule of thumb?

[Silver]

Also should I watermark my images on the web?  I try not to do it, I feel its a distraction from the image?

[Worst Case Scenario]

resizing and compressing are two different things.

Resizing is phyically making the image a different size. You can make images smaller no problem, but making them bigger will mean loosing quality. Compressing is the setting used in the jpeg file. When you save a file as a jpeg it will give you a slider for quality. The higher the number the better the quality, but the file size will be bigger and therefore slower to download. A smaller number will give you a smaller file size but at a reduction in quality. About 7 on the scale should give you the best of both worlds,.

[Worst Case Scenario]

These days a one website size will not fit all! People will want to see it on their laptops, their phones, their 22″ monitor and their 42″ TV.

[Silver]

Can I message you Worst Case if I have any questions?  I’m trying to find a mentor in my area, but they are charging a lot of money to even give a portfolio review.  I understand they are busy, and I dont blame them.  I’ve been learning on my own picking up tips and tricks here and there.  I will not spam you LOL I just have a question once in a while.

 

[iliketag]

Most photographers that I have seen will charge anywhere from two to four times the cost of prints. If your client wants a standard size canvas gallery wrap, they will be looking at paying around $300, if not more. I think about what I would be willing to pay for prints and things like gallery canvas, knowing the quality of work I’m getting from my photographer and the print lab. Do some comparison shopping within your area and see the pricing from your lab. Some photographers will include the price of a canvas in their package or session fees and “gift” them to their client. That way it’s a surprise but at least the base price is covered.
I’ve never had to flesh out pricing though so I’m sure someone else can give you a better idea.

As for watermarking, I would definitely put something non-intrusive on the image that just shows it’s yours. They can still be cropped out of cloned out by some dastardly villain, but it’s a little bit of a deterrent and it helps with things like pinterest/facebook sharing.

[Worst Case Scenario]

your site looks better already!

[JanJan]

I tried posting something up yesterday, but it didn’t show. If this shows up twice, I apologize.

I work full-time and freelance as a web and graphic designer, so I have more expertise in this area than in photography. (I’m in the same boat as you BTW.)

I’m going to echo what everyone is saying here. Your pictures are too large and will need to be compressed for the web. Especially in the age of smart phones and tablets, the smaller the file size the better.  I rather load a 400KB image file versus a 4MB file. Also, although I’m on a 1080 HD monitor, not everyone view it the same.

This is how your website looks on a 720 HD monitor:

This is how my website looks on the same monitor:

It is best-practice to have all your important content sit on “top of the fold” meaning that you’re not making your customers scroll to see the rest and its in plain view.  According to the screenshot of your website, in order to see the 2 main pictures (which I assume are your best work), I will have to scroll down. On mine, it sits within “the fold”.

For the home page, since this is the page that will initially attract your customers into viewing more of your portfolio, I suggest using your best shots that has a landscape orientation (horizontal) instead of portrait (verticle). Perhaps you can find a picture that is the width of both of the pictures, but a height shorter enough so people won’t have to scroll down.

Web designers are still using a 1024×768 screen resolution standard, meaning that the content is going to fit within these dimensions. This is why you see more empty space on some websites if viewed on a larger screen resolution. To see what your screen resolution is, go to your Mac or Windows machine and check the display settings.

I agree with JimC that you should look into WordPress because it can categorize your photos with ease, and it will be easier to add pictures. I would look into getting your own hosting. It’s affordable. Through GoDaddy (who is my hosting provider), I’m only paying $8 per month for the mid-range hosting plan. The cheapest hosting plan is as little as $4. If you’re looking to set up a WordPress site, you can just download WordPress from wordpress.org, unzip the file, and upload it into your web server. There are other components you will need to set up in order to get WordPress running (like a database), but it’s pretty easy. You can get GoDaddy’s customer service to help you out. They’re really helpful.

Here is my website:
http://www.photosbyanjanette.com

I hope this helps!

[Author]

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