Well after a month or so, of designing, tweaking and re-tweaking, my new website redesign is finally online.

If anyone has some time, I would appreciate some feedback (good and bad) about the new look.

My old site was too copy heavy (yes, I did cut copy here, believe it or not). I wanted to give my site a tight, fresh, and graphically friendly look.

My main emphasis of the site is Wedding video, with an added focus on Event video.

Here's the site:
LVProductions (http://www.lvproductions.net)

Michael,
Very nice look and very functional. Really appreciated the samples right up front and the flash viewer really plays them quick. Quality is high. Good job.
Randy

Great site Michael! It's very well laid out and easily navigable. It loads fast too. Very unlike a lot of bludomain sites I go too.


My only comment would be the home page. There's something I find "amiss" with the strong royal blue on the right hand side as bg color.

It maybe perhaps a personal preference. But there may be some other color choices which are more elegant and softer on the eyes.

Cheers.

Michael-

Great site! Usually when someone mentions that a site used to be copy-heavy it still is. Not so in this case. I found the information to be comprehensive, and easy to find.

I'm not sure what it looks like on Jason's monitor, but on mine the blue of the main page is not too strong at all. In fact, I think it is a good use of color (as are all the pages).

If I were to nit-pick (ins't it great when a critique is just a nit-pick?) I might change the phrasing of one sentence "Or maybe, on their wedding day, show your children how vibrant and full of life you both were at your wedding." to read "Or maybe show your children on their wedding day how vibrant and full of life you both were on yours."

It's not often I can say this, but I would honestly contact you regarding your services based on this web site. Well done!

Great site Michael! It's very well laid out and easily navigable. It loads fast too. Very unlike a lot of bludomain sites I go too.


My only comment would be the home page. There's something I find "amiss" with the strong royal blue on the right hand side as bg color.

It maybe perhaps a personal preference. But there may be some other color choices which are more elegant and softer on the eyes.

Cheers.

Thanks Jason and everyone for the feedback.
Actually I think that I have to agree with Jason here a bit. After viewing the main page again, I realized that the blue is a bit too hot, and hard on the eyes.

So I decided to keep in the blue theme and calm the color down a bit by making it a bit more of a subdued blue, almost jade color. I had already used green in a couple of spots and wanted something that was calming (reds were too hot) for the main page.
I am also a graphic designer, and studies have shown that the color can influence emotional reactions in people (orange=hunger, green=freshness etc.) with blue=trust. So I wanted blue for my main page more than any color.

Michael-

Great site! Usually when someone mentions that a site used to be copy-heavy it still is. Not so in this case. I found the information to be comprehensive, and easy to find.

It's not often I can say this, but I would honestly contact you regarding your services based on this web site. Well done!

Thanks Frank, that's a great compliment coming from a fellow vendor.
I'm happy how tight the site turned out. While not as elegant as some peoples sites, I wanted something that was both masculine and feminine and the same time.

The only thing I have to now is to optimize my site a bit better for web engines. Not much, but a bit more tweaking of the meta data and alt tags. And add a testimonial page as well as a blog.

Great site Michael! It's very well laid out and easily navigable. It loads fast too. Very unlike a lot of bludomain sites I go too.

Cheers.
One other thing in regards to the bludomain comment.
I had originally started off with developing an all Flash based site, but decided against it for a couple of reasons.

1. It is possible, but extremely difficult to optimize a Flash website for search engine usage.
2. From my experience, all Flash based sites, tend to run a bit slow, and sometimes lock up in browsers

So I figured that it would be best to develop the site in mainly HTML and just rely on Flash for the Video Gallery, by using a Flash jukebox. That and of course I do a lot of Flash numbers (audio/video) encoding crunching on my end, to get the best image at the smallest file sizes. My average FLV file is somewhere around 10-15 mb's or so.

Wow, that is a beautiful web site. Did you use any type of program to help build it or did you just use code. I am vaguely familiar with programs. I'm envious of your web site :)

Wow, that is a beautiful web site. Did you use any type of program to help build it or did you just use code. I am vaguely familiar with programs. I'm envious of your web site :)
Mary thanks for the compliement. I'm happy how it came out as well. I went through several different designs and tweaks on this one. I was tired of my old site and thought that it needed a much tighter, fresher look. The main goal was to relate a fresh light hearted feel for potential brides and video clientel. This is why I tried to change up the colors on each page to create a feeling and mood for what the page contained. Of course it also helped to have good video from which I could pull frames from.

I used code (HTML and designed in Dreamweaver) for everything except the JAVA Script Menu. For that I sued a program to create the menu and inserted it in my HTML.

The video gallery I designed using a flash video jukebox that someone referred me to.

everything looks great, but i do not like the way information is left to side of the screen while these big pictures take over almost all the space and emphasizethe "boxed" look of the pages.
i do not like too the way page redraw/switch (would be better with menu and header in a persistent frame ? or page transition ?).

everything looks great, but i do not like the way information is left to side of the screen while these big pictures take over almost all the space and emphasizethe "boxed" look of the pages.
i do not like too the way page redraw/switch (would be better with menu and header in a persistent frame ? or page transition ?).

What do you mean by the redraw?
I assume that you are referring to the JAVA drop down menu. I tried having everything in one frame but preferred a redraw menu style with highlighting. It's a personal preference I guess.

As for the large dominating pictures, that's what I intended to do. I wanted each page to be visually dominant with large graphics to covey an attitude for each page. Sounds strange, but the content is actually secondary in my thought process. Especially since some pages have extensive text.

My old site was too text heavy and as such I wanted to go int total opposite direction and go more graphical. Besides doing live sound and video, I am also a graphic designer for a direct mail company (mainly print but also do some web), and one of the main marketing tactics we employ is a dominant image (could also just be large bold text) to convey the thought, then the headline, then the copy and offer.

good design but you're not taking advantage of vertical real estate - on a monitor with decent resolution, you're still forcing me to scroll instead of just being able to see everything.. otherwise, good job - lots of previews and easy to find info

I don't like the font... it's probably just me but I hate seeing Arial or Times on a Web site. Maybe something like Tahoma or Verdana? They should come with any Windows box, and if you have Office for Mac installed they will be on your Mac.

I like the blue color on the main page... don't care so much for the purple on the 'About Us' page though.

I like the use of the pictures, and I thought the Vendors page was a good idea.

Also, I agree with Mike about the vertical resolution. Although it would interrupt your design, it would be nice not having to scroll. Other than that I like it (except for the font!)

It takes allot of work from conception to final. Being a former web guy I can relate, although I continue to design my own sites.

At the moment I'm viewing your site through a PeeCee using Firefox.
When I roll over any menu or submenu, the main context underneath shifts left-right. It does not repeat this bug if another mouse-over is required. This does not happen using IE.

I would suggest when your visitors check availability via gigbuilder and the date is unavailable, that you provide a link back to the contact page instead of the home page. Less of a drill down if they need to try another date..

Congrats on your bookings, I clicked on "Editing Status" and see you have a moderate backlog :-)

Perhaps in the future for the next revamp, you can include other types of video work in your portfolio i.e. stage, band....
.
.

Vince thanks.
I am actually going to be adding some stage and band previews in the future.
they will be on a separate video page. The only thing about my stage shows is that they are for a lot of middle and elementary schools, and I have this thing about posting video of children online (I'm not a huge fan of that. It's just a personal privacy and comfort thing).

The flash jukebox is great in the fact that i only have to update an XML sheet and the video changes are instant. Much more efficient that having to create a separate page for each video, which I did on my last site.

As for the menu shift, I did experience this on my PC using Firefox, but it does not happen on my Mac (which I'm on now). Everything else was tested on Safari, IE, and Netscape with no issues. Don't know what the dael is with PC Firefox though.

Thanks for taking the time to look.

good design but you're not taking advantage of vertical real estate - on a monitor with decent resolution, you're still forcing me to scroll instead of just being able to see everything.. otherwise, good job - lots of previews and easy to find info
Mike thanks for taking the time to look.
Wow this thread is expanding quickly for a post that was made 2 months ago.

Anyway, I do agree about not taking advantage of the vertical real estate for my text. I wanted to make the page layout as self contained as possible and tried to set it up to take advantage of users with smaller screens without having to scroll across every time on their screen when viewing a page. I ahd some early testers (ironically also vidoegraphers) complain that they always had to scroll over to see the whole page on their smaller screen.

Also, if I wanted to give the user less scrolling then I would have had to compromise my original intent of the page layouts. Also the visitor would still have to scroll somewhat anyway, which is why I left it alone.

I did cut and rewrite quite a bit of copy, but didn't want to cut anymore copy than I already had. So it was a trade off. I'll probably take a look later on and see if I can cut down some more copy, especially on my Wedding page. As I still think it's too wordy.

I don't like the font... it's probably just me but I hate seeing Arial or Times on a Web site. Maybe something like Tahoma or Verdana? They should come with any Windows box, and if you have Office for Mac installed they will be on your Mac.

I like the blue color on the main page... don't care so much for the purple on the 'About Us' page though.

I like the use of the pictures, and I thought the Vendors page was a good idea.

Also, I agree with Mike about the vertical resolution. Although it would interrupt your design, it would be nice not having to scroll. Other than that I like it (except for the font!)
Nick, thanks for looking.
Yeah I'm not crazy about the font either, I actually prefer Trajan when possible, over Tahoma and Veranda. I would have rather preferred to simply create teh copy as a graphic to be consistent. But then I would have lost text optimization for Google and such.

Funny, the purple is the color I like best (my personal favorite color). Actually that graphic will also be changing, as it will be replaced with a portrait of myself, the wife, and our new baby (and maybe the dog) when we have one professionally taken. The joined hands are poignant being that it's bout us (two people). But I wanted it to be more about me, hence the pictures personalization when it's taken. Besides I want everyone to see my ugly mug.

As for the blue on the main page, that was intentional. As I have read up on the subliminal use of color on the human psyche, and blue signifies trust (especially baby blue, which was too light for the page).

Nice site. Keeps a consistancy but varies enough to make it interesting. Video is nice, I use the same flash media player on a web site I take care of.

On a different subject of your business, you refer that you went to HD but you don't reference what equipment you use. What camera(s) are you using now?

Thanks and have a great day, lastly, do you do videography full time?

Jeff

Jeffery, we currently are no using Sony FX1's and Canon HV20's (which are mainly used as capture decks or 3rd alter cams). We also still us a PD170 for some product training videos which I shoot.

I don't mention what equipment I use anywhere on the site. People really just don't care and wouldn't even know what equipment we would be referencing.
I just mention that we use quality audio recorders and have transitioned to HD cameras. So I don't bore them with the technical details and just focus on the quality. Which my main goal of the text on the site is to focus on our quality and our desire to form a personal working relationship.

I haven't posted any of the FX1 samples online yet, as I haven't gotten to those edits yet.

I think I mentioned this a few posts back but, I actually do graphic design for a direct mail company full time, and have this as a second business.
You could call it full time though, since I spend 40-80 hours per wedding video. Stage and cooperate video is obviously not as long or intensive.

Just to agree, very nice clean site....all the info that is needed and pleasing to the eye.

Out of curiosity what was the flash gallery you actually used? Have not seen that one before...

Just to agree, very nice clean site....all the info that is needed and pleasing to the eye.

Out of curiosity what was the flash gallery you actually used? Have not seen that one before...
The player was from this site:
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player

I used the player setup wizard to layout the player how I wanted and copied and pasted the code in my page. I downloaded the FLV player and have it on my server and it's coded in my HTML accordingly. I wanted the player on my server and not another.
Of course I had to create an XML file for the playlist.

The player setup wizard is here.
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?page=wizard

[QUOTE=Michael Liebergot;849353]The player was from this site:
http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Media_Player

An even easier way to use Jeroen's player would be if you'd have a wordpress website, through plugins it's quite easy to implement with a minimum of coding knowledge.

I did like the site as well, well structured and even if you can discuss font and color it's really not that important, content is. I wouldn't disagree that a well designed professional site would give a client the impression that you A. must be equally professional or B. have been ripping customers of to pay for such an expensive site ;) but as long as it doesn't look like your grandfather build it, it will serve it's purpose.

With your site all that was needed was there and easy to find. I also liked the scroll bar with the text on each page as it keeps focus on the image on the left (just for visual purpose) and the navigation on top. (which I think is important because i think it will keep your client focussed on the sites content)
I really liked the availability checker, my site runs on wordpress and I have been looking for a plugin that could handle that, it would save me some work not to inform clients each time I can't accept their wedding.

Noa thanks for the reply.
I agree about using a Wordpress Blog for a website,a s I have started to see many use Blog pages as their main website. Blogs are indexed more frequently and seem to be a bit more Google friendly at the moment.

I decided to keep a site separate and start 2 different Blogger blogs (LVP Blog and a Tools of the Trade Blog), which are still a work in progress. When they are a bit more content intensive then I will link them from my main website. Both are currently linked to my main website for cross reference.

As for the availability checker, that came from Wedj.com and their Gigbuilder software, which I truly love. Not only can clients check availability, but also when booked, they can download contracts, make online payments, and most importantly for me, provide me with event details like party information, vendor info, timeline and such.

Michael...

Great website! Could you share more specifically what "Video Jukebox" code you utilized. Was it a pre-written application, or a coding examples using something like swfobject.

Thanks for any help!

Michael...

Great website! Could you share more specifically what "Video Jukebox" code you utilized. Was it a pre-written application, or a coding examples using something like swfobject.

Thanks for any help!
Chris take a look a few posts up, as I mentioned where the jukebox came from.
There is a wizard that will enable you to generate the appropriate code for your site. You then have to copy and paste it in your HTML document.

You will also have to download the player if you would like it to run on your server (which I prefer), ad you will also have to generate an .XML playlist for the jukebox. If you simply want a single player then no playlist is required.

Thanks, Michael.... I now know that there's a PAGE 2 of posts! DUH.... If I'd noticed that before I posted, I'd have seen you post where you described all of this.... sorry for the duplication.....

Hey Michael - nice site. I too am going the wordpress route. Its very easy to use this in conjunction with Vimeo so you can either embed the SD clip on your blog or provide a link to an HD version on Vimeo. (got the idea from Patrick's blog) Where are you getting your photos from? I've approach a few photogs I've worked with about using some of their work to feature on my pages. Seems like it would be a win-win but no takers yet. I looked at some photos on istock but some of them look "too slick".

Art

Hey Michael - nice site. I too am going the wordpress route. Its very easy to use this in conjunction with Vimeo so you can either embed the SD clip on your blog or provide a link to an HD version on Vimeo. (got the idea from Patrick's blog) Where are you getting your photos from? I've approach a few photogs I've worked with about using some of their work to feature on my pages. Seems like it would be a win-win but no takers yet. I looked at some photos on istock but some of them look "too slick".

Art
Thanks Art, I know that many are gong the Wordpress Blog route, but for some reason I didn't. Don't remember my reasoning.

As for the photography, they are my pictures. At the event I also take along a small camera and snap a few pictures from time to time. Mainly to use for cover artwork. I get lucky sometimes with some of the pics.

There are a few stock photos, but most are from actual weddings of mine.

We just recently had our first child (baby girl), and we are going to have a family portrait done soon (me and wife, baby, and dog). This picture will be going up on our "about us" page in place of the holding hands, which is currently just a placeholder. This should give it a more personal feel that I want this site to have.

I haven't had the opportunity yet, but I just switched over to HD, and will be taking a few stills with the camera as well as attempting to pull some frame grabs off of the actual video.

well then - nice job on the photographs! I've taken a few stills from time to time but quite frankly I'm so challenged with the video stuff I'm resigned to leaving the stills to the pros.

Art