The site looks really great. It’s not like the clinical business style sites you see so much. It’s got personality and gives a sense of comfort that you’re really passionate about what you do. Your writing style gives a good impression of the kind of person you are and showing a personal side creates a sense of trust. A very important thing to remember when writing things on a website is that you should address it to the individual, not the crowd, and be personal. That is exactly what you have done. So, my complements for getting that right. The design and the content are also in harmony. A lot of people don’t get that right either.
Here and there there’s a little “oops” so bare with me, I didn’t build you up with my complements to tear you down, I just want to give you a few pointers to polish it up to a shine.
The splash page, oh, what to do? It took a while for me to realize that there’s actually quite some text at the bottom of it. So… that makes it actually more than just a splash page. I keep questioning why you chose to do it that way. Is it content you actually want people to read or are you hoping Google will index you more to the top when people search for a photographer in the State College PA area? If you really want people to read it, place a link named “skip down to content” or something, to an anchor at the top of the text. If it’s for Google, eh… don’t. There is enough there for an Info page or you could call the page “Hiring” In any case there are other more effective ways to get good Google karma. You’ve done such a good job making your site valid XHTML and CSS, and then you go and put a splash page in front of it in HTML with inline CSS and using HTML tags & attributes like <font> , <center> and tables for layout which we all agreed we weren’t going to do anymore ?? If you really want a splash page, it would be so much cooler to use flash. Quite honestly the current one doesn’t do the rest of the site justice.
On the post pages, the text is hiked up behind the title.
If you go to your stylesheet and change this:
.contenttitle {
float : left;
width : 500px;
margin : 0;
padding : 0 0 0 10px;
}
to this:
.contenttitle {
margin : 0;
padding : 0 0 0 10px;
}
it should take care of it.
The Nextgen Gallery slideshows have the default setting of 10 sec. between pictures. Which is okay but some people aren’t so patient. If you go in your wp-admin menu to gallery -> Options -> Slideshow, you can tick the box behind “Show navigation bar” And then a little button bar will appear when you hover with the mouse over the slideshow with next and previous buttons. You can go ahead and tick the “Show loading icon” just below it as well since some slideshows take a while to start after the page goes blank. The loading icon will tell the viewer the page is actually doing something.
If you find some pages with pictures are getting too long, you can use the <!--nextpage--> code in your posts. this subdivides the post over several pages. You can use the <!--nextpage--> as often as you want in a post or Page. Each instance creates a new page. It took me a while to discover that option in WP. I was real happy when I did.
That’s all I got for you.
The pictures on your site are really good. If I ever get married in your area I’ll be sure to hire you. ??
-John
