Solicitation for new website feedback.

http://www.lifeimage.net/
I am in the midst (well, actually about 90% finished) of a website redesign. I would like to get some feedback from other pro photogs. The only thing I must warn you of is that I am an American expat that works and lives in Brazil, so the site is in Portuguese. Eventually, I'll get around to doing a site in English, too, but not right now. Having said that, there is really very little text to worry about. I would hope that one could find the images even without reading a word of portuguese.
Anyhoooo....any constructive comments appreciated. TIA

Wow. What an overwhelming response :-(
I did get one person that commented via private email. My thanks go out to that person. Please, if anyone has 5 minutes of time to visit the site and post comments or criticisms...please do so. I'd appreciate it and will be willing to return the favor in the future. TIA

[Cliff_Spicer]

Hi Scott,

It appears to me to take a long time to load (using a DSL connection) and you have developed a certain look and colour scheme for the first few pages and completely dropped it on the featured weddings section. The featured weddings section appears to only load in a small area on my screen and I really don't like the way you navigate through the images. I think having to have someone click each image should be an option but not the only way to advance the images. I may have missed something but the site is a good start.

Cliff

[Jeff_Tiemann]

Scott,

I did go to your site yesterday but I did not feel qualified as a "designer" to coment. Thus I will comment on my experience as an average viewer. The first thing I noticed were your color selections. I like that you chose something other than black, white or gray, but I do not like the colors that you have, they felt really early 90s to me. Also, the first image that comes up (of the woman with her eyes closed) seems to suggest that your site is going to be about beauty and fasion - yet I did not find any other images on the site that were closely related to the first image. This brings me to another point, I do not get a real business sense of what this site is about - to me, it looks like a weekend photographer who has put some of his best samples online as a general portfolio. After looking at your site, I think that your photography is very good, but I am not really moved in any way emotionally.

The architecture of the site is very nice and easy to navigate. I like the design from a practical standpoint. If I were going to make some suggestions on how to improve your site, I would keep the layout the same. I would consider changing the colors to perhaps some predominant tones that exist within your artwork. And, from a business sense, I would go to your galleries and decide which of those categorys that generate the best income for you and drop the rest. This way, you can specialize and keep your site narrowly focused on a single concept - which will in turn have much greater impace on your viewing audience. If you go to my site http://www.tiemannphoto.com you will also see several galleries, we are about to drop the wedding segment of our site and display only studio work as soon as I can port over the wedding content to a new (separate) site.

Well, there you have my input for what it is worth.

Best,

Jeff Tiemann

First, Cliff and Jeff...Thank You. Your input is greatly appreciated. As far as the color scheme goes, for better or worse, I need to stick with the green for now. It's my business color and everything I have (business cards, letterhead, flyers, etc) are printed with it. Maybe I'll rethink this when I start to run out of supplies. I can see why some might not like it. However, having said that, no matter what color I choose someone won't approve. ;-) Besides, color is a very cultural thing. Saturated colors are big here (I assume Miami Vice must have been huge here, hehe)....But regardless, I appreciate you expressing your opinions. I will keep it in mind in the future.

Cliff, maybe it wasn't obvious enough, but there should be a navigation bar on the bottom right of the screen when viewing any of the galleries. It has options for single advance, automatic timed advance, turn off thumbnails, etc. It that not appearing on your screen? If not, what system/browser are you using? I'd like to know so I can test it out. Thanks. BTW, I opted for having the galleries open in seperate windows and then use a script to make the windows centered on the screen at a certain size. I did this to make people more aware that a separate window had opened (they can see the originating page behind the new window). There are a lot of internet illiterates here who might not even notice that the new window was covering the originating page. Did that make any sense? Maybe not...maybe it was a dumb idea. Seemed like a good idea at the time ;-)

Jeff, as far as the hodgepodge of types of galleries. That is sort of a reflection of the market here. Photographers from my region do a bit of everything. They have to. You can't specialize because the market doesn't support the pricing structure for specialization. My 3 big markets are weddings, kids bdays, and a bit of industry work. That is why it is basically those things which appear on the site. I did throw in some of my preferred travel photography on the main broadband page. Perhaps, I'll take that out. You'd be right to say that it doesn't fit in. I'll think about it. I did notice, however, that your own site isn't so different. It seems to feature 3 different market segments: weddings, wedding fashion, and portraits. Do you view these as mutually exclusive? My clients for weddings often become commercial clients after the fact, or vice-versa. I guess that reflects in the site style. Brazilians aren't so worried about clean divisions...they are willing and actually enjoy mixing things up a bit.

As far as the opening image of the woman with her eyes closed. A big part of my wedding sales come from the "making of" of the bride. Brides often spend the entire day (leading up to the wedding at night) in a beauty salon/spa. They love to have this photographed. It makes them feel like the supermodel they lust to be. This opening image caters to that segment of my market. In summary, you are right that I am not qualifying my markets very much. It isn't a luxury I can afford. Nobody pays me to be specialized, so I don't.

As far as the site looking like the site of a weekend photographer...well, I'll just ignore that part. ;-) Ouch.

I am still researching the load times. The modem site opening page is less than 50K total. Not sure why it should be taking such a long time. Maybe it's because of being on a Brazilian server. I guess even the computers here are lazy ;-) The broadband site has a 700K flash slideshow that has to load. I am just learning flash and not sure if it is possible to have a "pre-image" shown before the main show starts. Thats why I added the loading progess bar. At least people can see the progress and know that something is coming. But I really would like to have had a "preimage."

Did either of you have issues with font sizes? Or general screen size/usage? I designed it for a 1024x768 minimum resolution.

Ok, to end this endless post, thanks to both of you for taking the time to view the site and make comments. I really do appreciate the feedback and am considering your suggestions for future changes.

BTW, Jeff, it says on your site that you have traveled a bit. Whereabouts? Every get to South America?
Cheers.

[Cliff_Spicer]

Scott,

You need to do something about the alignment of the gallery page (put in a table?)as I didn't even notice the navigation tucked away in the far right hand side when I am using a resolution of 1280 X 960.

All the best,

Cliff

[Jeff_Tiemann]

Scott,

I have traveled extensively through Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. I have always wanted to visit central and south America, but have yet to have the opporunity to do so. I lived in Uzbekistan for one year where I was really able to gain wonderful insight on the culture of that region. As far as the colors on your website, I kinda figured as much - that perhaps those color pallets were linked to your location and what typical businesses might use.

As I mentioned before, I will be dropping the wedding segment off of my site in the future and featuring only studio portraits. We only do two types of portraits in our studio, legacy and bella. These are exclusive concepts to our studio and we specialize in this look. No one else in my area does anything like it. I eventually want to sell the wedding component of my business or bring on someone to manage and work the wedding stuff on a salary basis - we'll see...

It is obvious from you reply to my initial statements that we share different philosophies in buiness so I hope nothing I said offended you. I think that you are a good photographer, but I still think that being a specialist in something will take you much further (for what it's worth to say)

Best,

Jeff Tiemann