Critique Online Portfolio Gallery

MattCoops

Need some feedback on our portfolio gallery: http://www.cupantileandpaint.com/gallery.html

Does the gallery need to be changed?
Is the imaging too complicated to understand?

or

Is the gallery good as is?

thanks for your comments

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Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

Mike Finley

For whatever reason, your websites don't show up in my brower anymore. Always comes up can't display the page.

Second Look

The navigation is dead intuitive. The rendering is awful on my PC, both for Firefox and IE. BTW, I'm using a wide screen laptop which runs in 1280 x 720 resolution.

Attached Thumbnails

 

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Second Look home improvement www.SecondLookHome.com
Handyman and Home Repair Specialist in Rhode Island
RI Licensed Lead Safe Remodeler/Renovator, RI Registered & Insured Contractor

King of Crown

IMO seems too complicated. you have your logo over the picture, and it makes me want to see what is beneath it. and the pictures that are stacked on top of each other are kinda cluttered. Just my two cents.

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Real nice guys

Nathan

Loads REALLY slowly for me. Also, I would loose the google ads. It seems out of place.

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Nathan

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot

MattCoops

sorry for the ignorance
but what is dead intuitive?

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

MattCoops

hugh, that's vwierd

its coded in valid transitional html and css

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

MattCoops

loads slow?

the whole active directory is under 800kb

the large image on page is under 50kb

what are you using for isp? AOL or Netzero?

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

John S

Lose, the google ads, they come up over your links to the left of the screen and in whole contribute to the clutter.

Pics, are interesting I've never seen a layout like that before.
(personaly don't like)

Load time for me is about .5 sec's (High Speed)

Cheers

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John
www.ready4rent.ca

George Z

This Home Depot Painting ad comes up:

Paint Interior
Leave the painting to us!
Sign up online now for your consultation

If you keep sending your visitors to Home Depot Painting services,
I don't know what your lead acquisition costs are,
but if you lose a handful of jobs to Home Depot painting
you need to get a lot of money from Google to make it up.

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Toronto Painters Commercial Painting Commercial Painting Toronto Toronto Office Painters
Painting Toronto Blog

Mike Finley

Had to load your site using AOL to see it.

Anyways, you seem to be focuses on what is know in design as "form over substance", it's is when the design overtakes and over powers the purpose of something. You remind me of the way websites were designed back in the late 90s when people were just thrilled to see an animated gif. Remember all the websites with animated gifs of everything, the old email gifs?



People would put all this stuff on websites because it was cool to them, but it did nothing for the design or helped a websites main purpose which is to transfer information.

You website has only one purpose, which is to transfer information. The more fancy gimmicks, the more confusing colors, the more confusing elements you put into it puts another layer between it and your customers.

Simplicity of design, design without being noticed is the most powerful design you can have. The Mona Lisa is the greatest work of art in the world because of the simplicity of it.



Like the 90s most website design that serves no purpose really serves it's creator and not it's user, the only thing that has changed today is the flash is more complex, but it still does nothing but distract from a websites only purpose, which is to transfer information to it's user.

You might be better served to stop designing your website for yourself and start designing it with the user in mind. If you do so, you will soon discover that the real user cares less about all the flash and more about simplicity. Let the pictures of your work do the talking instead of how they fly out of a pigs butt and zoom across the screen to land on the finger tip of porky pig.

(And once again, get rid of the Google ads. I can't imagine why anybody would sabotage themselves by having ridiculous Google ads on a website for your customers, it makes absolutely no sense)

George Z

On that point Mike,
I think you captured the "What's in it for me" better than most of us.
Your site can almost be used as a skeleton for a lot of sites.
I mean the concept only, and definitely not by your competitors.
Mine can use a lot of that too.

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Toronto Painters Commercial Painting Commercial Painting Toronto Toronto Office Painters
Painting Toronto Blog

MattCoops

Mike,

can you go into more detail on what you're saying?

There's no animated gifs, which makes for faster loading

Theres no frames or tables (a thing of the 90s)
everything is held within containers using Cascading Style Sheets

there's no flash
or anything distracting
You don't like the layout?

what distracts you?

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

DerrickVWS

MattCoops,

I reconstructed the skeleton of your website and put an example portfolio design in place. This would be my suggestion. People are getting used to scrolling, so a longer page isn't that big of deal. Just make sure to put the category of photos that people most often have interest in at top. (For example: kitchen remodels/tiling)

http://visionwebservices.com/cupan

(You have top copy/paste my link since I don't have 15 posts yet. This site is not public and is for testing only.)

The layout needs to be improved a little. The category titles should be enhanced a little and maybe spaced better.

Good luck!

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Derrick Delliquadri
Vision Web Services | Contractor Websites

mickeyco

I took a look


It's a cool image effect but not really suited for a contractor site, KISS (keep it simple, stupid), make it real easy, most people will see it as an error, I know when I first looked I thought all the images were scaled improperly and thought it might be my browser until I scrolled over them. The other problem I had was having to scroll the page up and down to see all the images. The speed problem is probably the google ad thing, my browser shows what is happening when a page loads and on yours it's spending a lot of time at google prior to loading your pictures. I'm a big fan of the roll-over image galleries, here's a link to an old one I did, take a look, might give you some ideas:

http://users.foxvalley.net/~jennifkar/hd/carpentry.htm

Mike Finley

Don't really know what else to say, I think I said it all.

Nobody said you have animated gifs, I said what you are trying to do reminds me of the internet sites back in the late 90s (A design that serves no purpose other than to use a gimicky thing because the site owner thinks it's cool)

Flash - I'm not talking about Flash the software used to display images on the internet. Flash as in - flashy, shiney objects that attract attention for no reason other than to attract attention.

Flashy as in "kitsch" like - something of tawdry design, appearance, or content created to appeal to popular or undiscriminating taste.

I don't know how else to explain it, but have you noticed you are getting the same comments over and over again from everybody on each of your site redesigns? You obviously care a great deal about your website, so maybe the best advice is possibly start thinking about hiring a professional?

I mean, what possible purpose do you think it serves your potential customers to view your portfolio and see squished pictures that expand when you mouse over them?

A good gut check may be to look at some fortune 500 companies websites? Companies that can and do spend upwards of 1 million dollars on their websites don't use for lack of a better word ~ $2.00 parlor tricks. They could afford anything they want and if you look at their sites you will see simplicity is what dominates them.

I always believe that flashy stuff like you are using is always coded into websites for the enjoyment of the website designer and not the end users of the sites.

DerrickVWS

I just realized that I left my test site password protected. I removed the password so everyone can view it properly.

http://visionwebservices.com/cupan/



Also, I agree with most of what Mike Finley has to say. Simplicity is King. Even my thumbnail zoom test in my above link is a little "flashy". But we feel it does a good job of keeping things simple of a visitor as well.

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Derrick Delliquadri
Vision Web Services | Contractor Websites

Mike Finley

Derrick I think you have a more elegant and user friendly solution for the plain old image gallery. One thing I would do even though you have the comments in the mouse over to tell people to click to enlarge is actually put "click to enlarge" under each picture.

A long time ago I was part of a company that we did online retail sales, we were so early adopting all this when we went to banks looking to process credit cards online, the first 5 of them had no idea what we were talking about!

Most of our competition didn't even use shopping cart software back then, hard to believe now. Anyways I was responsible for web design, layouts, useability and customer service. I would talk to customers all the time to solve their problems and I was always amazed at how people couldn't navigate a website. Even walking them through something over the phone step by step if you didn't have a big "CLICK HERE" in 60 pt type they couldn't figure out what you were talking about. It was excellent training because I would get feed back and have changes made, then more feed back and more changes, it taught me exactly what worked, what didn't what percentages you had to give up for certain things in website design. We lived by the rule of 3, have a minimum of 3 different ways for a customer to navigate to the same place on your site.

Basically if you get a 6 year old to navigate your site, if they can find something then you probably have your site dumbed down enough for the general public to find what they want maybe at least 50% of the time.

MattCoops

I thought the layout was fairly straightforward and simplistic
it just uses a bit of color and branding
our logo and that green bathroom with the mosaic tile are in all of our marketing materials, burning that image into their eyes

I felt the site was understandable
and the lady next door is 85 years old and she can navigate the site well. I asked her to surf my site and stood behind her and watched.
she hit a few pages, the service page, interior paint, then the portfolio
she knew what to do to use it. It's printed 3 times there. The "3" rule if you will.
Nothing is thrown around, no paint spatters everywhere
theres crisp clean lines a 2 color pallette
over white canvas with black type
I felt the imaging was something eye catchy, which is what imaging is
I guess the plan was something to stop the readers,
make em read a bit,
and then click on to get more info on products/services and see portfolio
I wanted to control the flow

I didn't forget about the end-user, they're in mind the whole time.
I wanted an easy navigation, which is smack dab in middle of screen, clearly visible, and most know that is a navigation bar

there's more stuff on left orange box

theres no link farms on bottom of page

bottom line purpose is to get them to call

if the site doesn't accomplish that its rubbish
that's why our phone number is displayed on every page
rather than a small fine print on a contact form page
or worse, none at all

emails dont set appointments
emails are for stallers
and I'm still learning how to close harder on stallers

but if the site sucks, I want to know
and I want to know what needs changing and ideas to capture an audience. I can't stand behind something thats crud.
kick some ideas in my face

__________________
Matt with Cupan Custom Tile & Paint of Lowell, Massachusetts
Design and installation of ceramic tile and natural stone for floor, wall, and countertops
(978) 601-8774 | cupantile@gmail.com | view tile pictures and more

streetracer

dead => downright in this context

The interface works fine. However the thumbnails are messed up and the logo seems to be in the wrong place.

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Second Look Home Improvement
SecondLookHome.com
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. --Henry David Thoreau