My site...your opinion...

[sanmich]

Hi all

I have finally re-edited a good part of my work, and built a site.
I would be very grateful to anyone willing to spend there some time and give me his/her opinion...

http://www.photomh.com/index.html

Also, and despite having shown my work in some very respectable places, I am still looking for an agency, or a publisher that would be interested in promoting this work. If any of you have ideas, it would be GREAT!

THANKS!🙂

 

[user237428934]

Great photos, but I think you want some feedback about the site itself. Here it comes:

I mainly use my small macbook for surfing and watching photos. If I start a slideshow, then the photos are displayed more in the lower half of the screen because the headline takes so much room. If I don't scroll up, I can't see the lower centimeter of the horizontal photos. That's not so nice

The slideshows are without any information about the context or single photos. I can only guess what it's about. I think for reportage photos there should be some information.

The miniatures of the photos in the player are useless because they are too small.

So I think the problem with you site is mainly the player itself and the position on the screen. Your good content deserves a better presentation 🙂

Hope this is not too hard.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

The website is no good if you actually want people to find your work and look at it and buy it. Flash should never, ever, EVER be used by a photographer's website. EVER. I do web design professionally in addition to my photography work. I know what I'm talking about here.

Aside from the fact that it is slow and annoying, Flash has a much larger disadvantage for us photographers. It makes your images absolutely invisible to search engines. If someone is looking to buy or license a photo, they often use Google's image search, or other search engines. They type in what they want: Basketball hoop on a barn, for example. Google brings up lots of photos of basketball hoops on barns. Including several that I did; I have several such photos on my site and a couple weeks ago I licensed one for a commercial use to a buyer who found it on Google. I made money. If someone searches for something you have photos of, they won't find your site. They'll find other people's photos and buy from them.

 

[sanmich]

Well, first, thanks a bunch!
You won't believe it, but I have no idea what the technology behind the site is. I fell realy out of the loop, having very little interest in that side of the technology. It's a simple shell site that allows me to present my work by directly reading it from Flickr sets. It had a huge advantage for me and it's simplicity.
I had no idea that it also has this serious flaw...:bang:
I will have to reconsider, and maybe try another site builder. If you have a suggestion, please don't be shy...

Chris, I understand your arguments, but about the search thing, I don't expect too much from random searches, and not being a pro, I have little interest in selling prints once in a long while. I just want to be able to send the link and specific people to be able to read it.
It seems it's failing on that one...

 

[ironhorse]

Please weigh the above more informed responses more than this but I did like the site and had no difficulty navigating through it. Nice work. The only thing that struck me was when I went to publications, I expected to click on to something pertaining to your work and not the general site. Good Luck.

 

[tlitody]

The website is no good if you actually want people to find your work and look at it and buy it. Flash should never, ever, EVER be used by a photographer's website. EVER. I do web design professionally in addition to my photography work. I know what I'm talking about here.

Aside from the fact that it is slow and annoying, Flash has a much larger disadvantage for us photographers. It makes your images absolutely invisible to search engines. If someone is looking to buy or license a photo, they often use Google's image search, or other search engines. They type in what they want: Basketball hoop on a barn, for example. Google brings up lots of photos of basketball hoops on barns. Including several that I did; I have several such photos on my site and a couple weeks ago I licensed one for a commercial use to a buyer who found it on Google. I made money. If someone searches for something you have photos of, they won't find your site. They'll find other people's photos and buy from them.

But flash content can be driven by xml input which can be identified as rss feeds as well loading content to flash gallery giving it extremely wide visibility to both google and the wider web. And google can see inside flash files. You just have to know how to do it. But as a professional you should know that. 😉

 

[mfogiel]

Michael,
First, there is a lot of stunning photos there, congratulations. You have a very strong sense of composition, which I think is the cornerstone of this work. I find particularly good many photos of the orthodox community. In my opinion, there would be a few shots form other projects and singles to weed out.
My main critique, would be about how this work is organized. After seeing the opening photo, I was expecting to find someting like a "GALLERY", with shots organized in categories. Instead, there are the projects, that are really reportages, and singles, that are showing a bit of everything.
I would organize the best photographs in the gallery, under a few topics, and additionally present the reportages as a separate body of work, together with some written comment about what it is, what you were interested to show, and so on.

All in all, an excellent beginning.

 

[JayGannon]

The website is no good if you actually want people to find your work and look at it and buy it. Flash should never, ever, EVER be used by a photographer's website. EVER. I do web design professionally in addition to my photography work. I know what I'm talking about here.

You should rally tidy up your own site then as it fail a HTML and Link Validator check.

Flash when used correctly is by far the most popular and effective way to display a portfolio online for photographers.

 

[MCTuomey]

michael, i love the photos, especially the judaica work. as to technical elements, i'm sorry but i don't have the knowledge to say.

i just noticed marek's post above - what he said.

fwiw, i do prefer to scroll at my own pace with the screen showing nothing more than the picture and title (if there is one) and a simple prev<>next toggle. don't like slideshows. as you know i'm an old guy, and somehow like to view photos on the internet just like i do at a museum: at my pace and with as few distracting elements as possible, i.e. a gallery stroll.

 

[Rogrund]

Brilliant and really interesting pictures, but like mfogiel I miss some kind of gallery.

 

[Lilserenity]

I would not recommend using HTML5.

Yet.

Main reason being is that support is so patchy for a standard that has not yet even been ratified as a W3C recommendation, and support across browsers is very patchy. Yes we can all say well that's Microsoft this, MS that -- but the reality is you will want to capture the biggest audience as possible and whilst I am a big proponent of IE6 sucks (because it does, it's 10 years old) -- it would be most unwise to switch to using technologies that are not supported on ~60% of your possible audience.

If you have the skills, you can do some fairly clever stuff with Javascript (e.g. a library like jQuery) to manipulate the page to do some of the things Flash offers, but it takes quite a lot of skill if you consider your web skills to be basic or intermediate.

Overall I think it's a reasonable website. My only suggestion is make the gallery things height a bit less, as on 1024x768/1280x768 (probably about 50% of your audence) there is some scrolling involved there as someone has pointed out.

Apart from that, with my pragmatic hat on, and the skills and tools you have available, I think it's a good effort, and it will be available to a good majority of your audience, using HTML5 tags would be the sure-fire route to reduce your audience much more greatly than using Flash does. Flash ain't perfect, but again I come back to what your available skilset is, the cost, and this is pretty good on balance.

I only wish I had the time or inclination to work on my own personal website but it's like a busman's holiday for me coming home to work on it.

Vicky

 

[JayGannon]

Hi all

I have finally re-edited a good part of my work, and built a site.
I would be very grateful to anyone willing to spend there some time and give me his/her opinion...

http://www.photomh.com/index.html

Also, and despite having shown my work in some very respectable places, I am still looking for an agency, or a publisher that would be interested in promoting this work. If any of you have ideas, it would be GREAT!

THANKS!🙂

Site is good but basic, if your courting an agency at the moment I would reccomend you pay for proper hosting as using a free service kinda takes away from the professionalism.
If I was looking to have a quick easy professional site I would look into something like

http://www.livebooks.com/

or a photoshelter/GPP site:

http://www.photoshelter.com
http://www.graphpaperpress.com

 

[sanmich]

Marek, Mike, Rogrund, thanks for the kind words. I try...🙂

To everyone: thanks for the inputs. Following your remarks, it is clear that the structure of the site needs to be improved.
I will work on this...

Ladies and gentlemen, please keep them coming...😀
Any suggestion about an output?

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

But flash content can be driven by xml input which can be identified as rss feeds as well loading content to flash gallery giving it extremely wide visibility to both google and the wider web. And google can see inside flash files. You just have to know how to do it. But as a professional you should know that. 😉

You're wrong, according to Google!

Google says on their own webmaster tools pages that they CANNOT index images on flash sites, only text. If a photographers images are invisible to Google, then his site has failed.

"At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files."

Read the whole article on Google's blog

 

[JayGannon]

Way to link to a 2 year old post, Google can index any XML feeding a flash site rendering the photos fully visible to their spiders. Reiterating that if the site is designed properly and compliant to standards flash presents no SEO disadvantage over a html/php site.

Relevant google post showing they follow external content into the SWF and associate them:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/flash-indexing-with-external-resource.html

Actually on further research they are apparently crawling the SWF itself when loaded via JS now due to collaboration with Adobe:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-feeling-even-better-indexing-of.html

 

[user237428934]

Way to link to a 2 year old post, Google can index any XML feeding a flash site rendering the photos fully visible to their spiders. Reiterating that if the site is designed properly and compliant to standards flash presents no SEO disadvantage over a html/php site.

Relevant google post showing they follow external content into the SWF and associate them:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/flash-indexing-with-external-resource.html

Actually on further research they are apparently crawling the SWF itself when loaded via JS now due to collaboration with Adobe:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-feeling-even-better-indexing-of.html

This is some interesting info. Thanks.

 

[tlitody]

You're wrong, according to Google!

Google says on their own webmaster tools pages that they CANNOT index images on flash sites, only text. If a photographers images are invisible to Google, then his site has failed.

"At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files."

Read the whole article on Google's blog

If you knew what you were talking about, which you don't, you would have understood what I said. Nobody in their right mind embeds images in flash. There are far superior ways to make flash work with images. None of his gallery images are emded in flash. If you knew what you were talking about you would know that. That is not to say he will get good indexing on his images because he won't. But that is not the point. The point is that you gave false information claiming to know what you are talking about when clearly you don't. Using Flash for a photo gallery and getting good indexing on images is easily doable for those who know what they are doing. And that means understanding the technology and how utilise it to full effect.
I get pretty peed off with amateurs claiming they know about flash when they don't. The bad name it receives is from people such as yourself who are not technically astute enough to be giving advice about it.

 

[JayGannon]

If your working for clients/agencies or courting them, their not looking at the site on an iPad, I agree in principle with you, but a professional site for professional agency audience is going to be viewed on a full size computer with a good screen. No photobuyer will buy off an iPad screen, and many have said as much in their blogs that they dont care about what the tech is as long as its easy to navigate etc
I would have some form of iPad friendly microsite but the main site can be flash without any issue if thats what the OP decides is best.

 

[tlitody]

Whilst we're on the topic, please can you review useability of this simple site:

http://www.timdolby.co.uk/

any IPAD users please feel free to let me know if it works for you

 

[Matus]

From a visitors point of view - the site WORKS. The way the design is done is not overly flattering (a bit to hard and edgy with too many lines - overly a bot "cold" to me), but it allows to find what one may be looking for. I would not comment on the "flash" issue as I am not up to that task.

Towards the content - I am wondering whether some descriptions would make it easier to comprehend better some scenes showed.