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new website (watercolors)

updated wed 13 sep 06

 

John Post on sun 10 sep 06


I created an website for one of my friends who is a watercolor painter.
I tested it on the 4 or 5 browsers that I have on my macs and windows
systems at home but am looking for other folk's feedback on the site.

Do you find it easy to navigate?
What do you think about the layout, design, colors etc.?
and from those who do this for a living, I am wondering what you would
charge for a site like this one?
I am not looking for a critique of the art, just of the site.

http://soomeelee.com/

(...we are adding a paypal account to purchase works next weekend)

If you have any comments or suggestions you can send them directly to me
or to the list if you like.
johnpost(at)wideopenwest.com

Thanks,
John Post

Kathryn Hughes on mon 11 sep 06


Really nice ans user-friendly. Easy to navigate. However, her story abruptlyends as she's telling it. Is it unfished? I liked the intensity of the colors of the work and how that contrasted with the simplicity of the web design. Excellent. It's easy on the eyes and not too much extraneous details. well done! Kathryn
John Post wrote: I created an website for one of my friends who is a watercolor painter.
I tested it on the 4 or 5 browsers that I have on my macs and windows
systems at home but am looking for other folk's feedback on the site.

Do you find it easy to navigate?
What do you think about the layout, design, colors etc.?
and from those who do this for a living, I am wondering what you would
charge for a site like this one?
I am not looking for a critique of the art, just of the site.

http://soomeelee.com/

(...we are adding a paypal account to purchase works next weekend)

If you have any comments or suggestions you can send them directly to me
or to the list if you like.
johnpost(at)wideopenwest.com

Thanks,
John Post

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Elizabeth Priddy on mon 11 sep 06


On the contact page, just as the story gets
interesting, the text disappears with no way to
navigate to get to it.

Very interesting.

E


Elizabeth Priddy

Beaufort, NC - USA
http://www.elizabethpriddy.com

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Steve Slatin on mon 11 sep 06


Murals page and contact page have 'lost' segments. On murals page
it's the right side of the column of writing; on contact page it's the
bottom of the page. Otherwise site works nicely. Personally I
liked that the thumbnails were B&W and 'colored in' when the
cursor went over them. Others might disagree.

-- Steve S

John Post wrote:
I created an website for one of my friends who is a watercolor painter.
I tested it on the 4 or 5 browsers that I have on my macs and windows
systems at home but am looking for other folk's feedback on the site.

Do you find it easy to navigate?
What do you think about the layout, design, colors etc.?
and from those who do this for a living, I am wondering what you would
charge for a site like this one?
I am not looking for a critique of the art, just of the site.


---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Get on board. You're invited to try the new Yahoo! Mail.

Maurice Weitman on mon 11 sep 06


At 10:56 -0700 on 9/11/06, Steve Slatin wrote:
>Murals page and contact page have 'lost' segments. On murals page
> it's the right side of the column of writing; on contact page it's the
> bottom of the page. Otherwise site works nicely. Personally I
> liked that the thumbnails were B&W and 'colored in' when the
> cursor went over them. Others might disagree.

Hi, Steve,

I think your report would be more helpful if you'd have included the
Browser/OS you're using. I would encourage anyone sending John
reports of their experience to do the same (and to do so off-list).

Btw, I had no problems with the above "lost segments" problem on my
Mac (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.7.4, OmniWeb 5.5).

And here is what I sent to John off-list:

>Hello, John,
>
>I haven't much time, but here's a brief "review." Okay, here's
>another Mac web browser report: OmniWeb v. 5.5.
>
>All seemed to work well, I might prefer a lighter background color.
>The icons and text font are great for me, especially of your artist
>likes it.
>
>But I really dislike the scrolling controls on the contact page.
>I'd much prefer either three buttons to the three "stories" or a
>conventional scrolling text box that would respond to arrow keys.
>
>I'm happy to check it out more in-depth later, and to answer any
>questions you may have at any time.

Regards,
Maurice

Carl Finch on mon 11 sep 06


At 10:56 AM 9/11/2006, Steve Slatin wrote:

>Murals page and contact page have 'lost' segments. On murals page
> it's the right side of the column of writing; on contact page it's the
> bottom of the page.

The wording is "lost" because the text is scalable. I use Internet
Explorer with View/ Text Size/ Medium and saw the same thing. When I
changed it to "Smaller" the words all displayed. But for my resolution
(1280x1024), "Smaller" is too small to read comfortably.

> Otherwise site works nicely. Personally I
> liked that the thumbnails were B&W and 'colored in' when the
> cursor went over them.

I liked that, too.

--Carl
in Medford, Oregon

John Post on tue 12 sep 06


I just want to thank all of you that took the time to make comments and
suggestions about the site I created.
http://soomeelee.com/
It's one thing to make something for the web and then quite another to
see how people interact with it.

Things I learned through this....

The little arrows on the contact page next to SooMee's picture will
scroll the text box up and down, but are not an obvious solution for
many... I need to stick with more common scrolling features so that
everyone intuitively gets to read her whole story.

Some of the information on the contact page would be better on another
page called "about me" or something like that. And the direct contact
information could be better.

Adding pictures that are larger would help those who have big monitors.
I designed the page so that it would look best on a screen resolution of
1024x768 and it would look OK at 800x600. But it's clear from some of
the responses that I got that many people now run higher resolutions and
for a fine art site, larger images would help to show the work better.
I have these images in huge resolutions (60-80 megabyte file sizes for
printing) so making larger images for the site shouldn't be a problem.

One person got error messages when running Internet Explorer 6.0. Maybe
because the site uses i-frames? I'm not sure, I run version 5.2 on a
mac and it shows up fine....so just one more detail to track down.

The other problem that I ran into was with text sizes. For some of the
text I used cascading style sheets formatting and had the text scalable
(ems) to the users settings in their browser. The problem with this is
that if your browser was set to display it larger than I anticipated,
the text gets cut off in the frames I set up for it. On the other hand
if your browser had the text set smaller, you might find the text
difficult to read. I will have to come up with a solution for this problem.

I got some emails that said the page was slow to load and others who
said the page loaded lightning fast. I'm thinking this has more to do
with individual servers and how you connect to the Internet than with
the web page graphics being too large.

I also had a few people correct grammar and spelling. I appreciate that
too. Cutting and pasting text errors, and just overlooking things is
easy to do when trying to lay things out visually. Proofreaders are a
necessity, so thanks for helping with this task.

Many of the emails I got pointed out other little problems too and I did
jot them down to correct them this weekend.

And I got a few that said everything worked fine through their browser
and that was good too.

It was great to have so many eyes critique something and see it from so
many different angles.
...and while it would have been great to have heard that it works
perfectly from everywhere in the world for everyone,
I am grateful for all the suggestions I got to make it better.

Thanks,

John Post
Sterling Heights, Michigan

PS... and I didn't get anyone who knew how much to charge for creating a
site. I do know that I spent around 40-50 hours total on it over the
course of a couple of weeks but I didn't hear from any web designers on
what they charge an hour or for a project of that size.