website critique

[*alli*]

I'm hoping to get your opinions on the website I just recently got up and running. Any critique you have on the photos, or the design itself of the site would be very much appreciated. I've had some great critique from this board so please don't hold back. Thanks everyone

http://www.allisoncano.com

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Looks good to me.

[wendigo]

Looks good. What did you use to build it?

[dipstik]

Clean design, loads quick, you just need more images!

[MakersTeleMark]

I get a voodoo scrollbar on the rhs of the bio page.

[gholman12]

^^ same here about the voodoo scrollbar - and +1 to the clean design! you don't do much post processing, eh? the images look clean out of the camera. personally i find that works great for photojournalism, but it prevents a lot of the pictures from really having the wow factor. but the raw material looks great and i'd say a bunch of the images could really get there with a simple vignette or an increase in contrast/vibrance, etc. my .02

[Tye 1on]

i like the first page, with a lot of color contrasted with the b/w.
bet there's a great story about the Calgary bike cop and the woman, super shot.
love the intensity on the chair basketball players' faces.
+2 to the clean design, would love to see more images on there, good shootin!!!!!!!

[redkal]

Splash pages are old news and an annoyance to many - pretty much an additional click... for what? I would remove it, when the user goes to the url you should put them on the page you get after you hit enter on that first page.

[*alli*]

thanks for the input. I wanted to wait and see that it wasn't just my monitor that made some of the images look like they need a bit more processing. Once I get some time I'll do a bit of work and reload them. as for the number of images, i'm still working my way through school, and I didn't want to put any up there that I wasn't really happy with, but more will come one I start getting more experience. I used qufoto to build the site, super easy, completely idiot proof with quick good results, which is key to me since i needed a good looking site up quick to get on applying for internships/practicums this year and jobs when I graduate.

[andrewjesaitis]

Splash pages are old news and an annoyance to many - pretty much an additional click... for what? I would remove it, when the user goes to the url you should put them on the page you get after you hit enter on that first page.

ehhh, i don't really care for splash pages, but in either case, I'd lose the blue/red box that borders the splash when you click it--the content loads fast enough that you don't need it.

other than that nitpicky comment, great design. i like it.

[*alli*]

^that's the first i've heard of a blue/red box on the splash page. wonder why that's showing up for you and not me.

[matanuskaski]

As others have said, great clean design. Nice work! Did you code everything yourself, Or start from a template?

[*alli*]

thanks. I used a web service that basically builds the site for you, all I had to do was upload the photos and choose the layout/colour scheme etc. later on when I have a bit more time, I may work with a web designer (ie: a good friend who is a web designer) and get something that's very very similar but with a few tweaks, as right now I can't upload video to the site, which I will be needing later on. but for my purposes right now, this is great.

[bklyn]

Looks good!

[LivinCO]

Nice site. Since nobody has said it yet... you should consider a non-flash / less use of tables design for search engine optimization purposes. Googlebot needs a way to index your site's content so you show up for the right keywords/phrases (photography, images, etc...) when people search and make sure those keywords are prominent within the text of the site.

A website is nothing if it can't be found, just my .02

[Crystal_Mt_Dreamin]

self ports??

[Hugh Conway]

nice stuff

the pictures in the sidebar were slow to load and there was no indication how many there were. if you weren't interested you wouldn't stick around

[andrewjesaitis]

^that's the first i've heard of a blue/red box on the splash page. wonder why that's showing up for you and not me.

Hmmm, that's odd. I'm running Firefox 3.0.3.

Looks like it is coming from your css

This is the class:

img {
border:medium none;
}

And when I remove that class, I see the same thing as when I click through the splash.

As I said, really a minor detail and might be unique to my system. I wouldn't worry about it. Awesome site! Very well done.