Need Input on Site
 

If anyone gets a chance could you take a look at my site. It needs some work, I have two different ways I'm showing the work. One you will see by going to the link, the other if you go to the information page and click on the link that says Flash. I'd like opinions on which works better.

http://www.michaelfsmith.net

Mike

mike- i liked your site...the "look" is fitting of your portfolio and its clean and simple...sweet. it was easy to navigate through.....which is important. i dunno what you would change?

I agree with Joe, theres no need to change anything.

Maybe a contact page but thats about it dude.. the site looks schmick :)

For Michael Smith.net
- Took a while to load up and I am seeing this from my fast work connection. You should explore non-Comcast hosting.
- The layout is ok
- I don't like that roundish cursor for the slideshow gallery on the right. Though the way the gallery works is ok.
- it seems strange to me that you have really dithered your name graphic and the 'photography' while at the same time you have burdened the viewer's bandwidth with loading up the Flash interface. If you have already decided on the 'broadband experience', then you might as well devote a few extra K to a less optimized title graphic.
- to me the transitions when opening the photo should be faster or dispensed with. After selecting a couple of the photos that transition got tired and just got in the way. Since you are selling yourself through your photos rather than the Flash interface, I would dispense with these or shorten them.
- I understand the decision to use a second font on the left menu but that one doesn't work for me. I can't explain why, really. Perhaps the font size needs to be smaller and less overstated.
- I would go with a sans-serif font for your "Information" body

Fotoplayer version:
- ACK! Don't use this please.
- music, annoying
- takes too long to load up
- Any interface that needs 1/3rd of the screensize to instruct the user on how to use it isn't a good one
- Ok, I see you can get rid of that 'info' screen. It is much better when that doesn't come up. I believe most users would be able to use it without reading the info screen. All of the non-obvious buttons are not essential anyway
- anyway, I don't see the big advantage of this slideshow / presentation software over what you had on your site.

your front page has a picture in gif format, which should not be used for pics... use the jpeg format for pics, and gifs for graphics/animation... the reason for doing that is so that you can shrink the size of the pic down.

on that same page, i would also dump the "michaelfsmith photography" page title... we already know who you are, because that's the name of the url we just went to, and it also sez your name on the front page as well.

that title bar space is mission-critical for ranking well in the search engines, so you need to take advantage of it by using keywords common to your industry... how about "wedding photography and dvd movies of your wedding ceremony in mytown", or some such malarky... change it for every page, keeping it relevant to whatever the page topic is; the city reference is where you live.

you should also have a short keyword-stuffed text blurb on the front page, outlining your business capabilities.

i'll second the motion that the page with the flash photo gallery is way too slow to use... is it using jpegs? hopefully all those photo's aren't rendered out to flash!

and btw, fix your spelling errors: Video Samples Comming Soon

Thank You Guys for the Input
 

I want to thank everyone who has responded for the valuable input. I will be making the improvements suggested. Nothing beats the observations of some of the experts we have on this group and I truely value them.

Mike