Opinion wanted about new website

[Monique McFarland]

I just completed this website for myself tonight and it is 2 a.m....lol...would like input as to whether or not is is simple enough to follow, too over the top here or there...enough information, not enough information. any tips and advice would be appreciated. I am able to change things myself on this site rather easily, to a certain degree.

I'm hoping this will be a good PR move, creating a streamlined, hopefull easy to navigate artist's site.

opinions?

Monique McFarland New Web Site

Monique

[Claudemir Bonfim]

I liked that very much. That's very friendly and clear.
Nice job.

[Monique McFarland]

Originally Posted by Claudemir Bonfim

I liked that very much. That's very friendly and clear.
Nice job.

GREAT ..... Thank you so much for taking time to check it out. We artists are each other's biggest critics...love hearing from other artists.

Thanks so much!!

P.S. I'll add more sizes to the descriptions when i get time to look each one up. Everything came from memory last night and by 2a.m., there weren't many parts of my brain that were still functioning!!

[Mischa Milosevic]

Well, to be honest, I think your web page design lacks and does not represent your art well. Simple design is good but you have painting with color and just for starters a black background does not suggest life, interest, it does not attract and give direction to such lovely artwork. You live in the South and your web design should have that at home feeling, a feeling of welcome. You can introduce some photos suggesting a setting for where the paintings live. I am doing a re design of my page as well trying to create a user friendly atmosphere. It is your gallery.

Maybe I am not expressing my self well but try and understand what I'm saying.

I hope this helps and all the best to you.

[Lisa Gloria]

I think the pictures of your paintings are very clear and of high quality. They demonstrate your talent very well! I'm not too keen on the slideshow - I prefer to drive The black background, IMO, is good, creates contrast for your paintings to pop, but the blue-green border seems to not have any significance. But mostly, the work is important, and yours looks great.

[Alexandra Tyng]

Actually I like the elegant design. (I'm turned off by some of the flowery, overdone website design that I see. As a result my website is very simple!) In the end, though, I think it is more important to reflect your own taste than to cater to the area in which you are living. Ideally, your website will introduce your art to people from all over the country and the world.

The black does set off your art nicely. although any shade of neutral would do it.

It would be nice to be able to open windows to get details of the faces.

My only concern is that when you talk about using the client's choice of photos, your wording is a little complex. Also, are you sure you want to be that agreeable? I think you should have more backbone and say up front that you will sit down wth the client and discuss the photos to see which ones the client prefers, and take that into consideration when choosing your references--but that the final decision is yours. I'm sure you can say that nicely. Then you won't have a problem when a client insists you use a photo you know would make an adorable snapshot but a bad portrait.

[Julie Gerleman]

Hi Monique,

I realize I'm late to this party but wanted to give my two cents just in case you're still interested in feedback. I've had the lucky (or unlucky, depending on the day) experience of being a webmaster for a large organization and have been studying usability for quite some time. I have found that whether the site is for artists or the site is for a Fortune 100 software company, certain principles will always apply.

I know I am always tweaking my own sites but I realize that most people aren't interested, either because the results they are getting are good enough or since they contract out their web development to others, every change means another $300 bucks or so.

Design: Overall, I agree with Alexandra. The simplicity, the elegance is very nice. In the photo I've attached, I made some changes I would have made to affect the usability of it. Hopefully you can see it; I had to scrunch the size of it.

First of all, as a web designer I never use black as a background color if I can help it. While in real life black is very elegant and is used often to set off the rich colors of a painting, electronically it reads too harshly (yes, I would include even this beloved forum in that assessment). If you want to use something elegant, go for a dark charcoal, #333333. See how the gray makes the green look a lot less pastel-ly? And for example on your Biography page, where there's lots of white text, that's just really hard to focus on for a long period of time, against a black background. I'm assuming you want people to read it.

Next, the font of your links in your global navigation. Use mixed case. Upper case is simply difficult to read. I would have "Home" as my first, left-most link. That's where people expect to see it. And I put more space inbetween each link. That improves how easily people will read the text.

Other than that, the content looks good and the functionality is fine.

Of course, your work is really nice! Are you getting good results from the site? What are you using to track your traffic?

[Cynthia Daniel]

Originally Posted by Julie Gerleman

. First of all, as a web designer I never use black as a background color if I can help it. While in real life black is very elegant and is used often to set off the rich colors of a painting, electronically it reads too harshly (yes, I would include even this beloved forum in that assessment).

There are different schools of thought on that. When i first started designing sites, I used black. After a while, I got severely criticized for it. So, then I never used full black. Thereafter, I got artists complaining that I didn't use black - can't win.

At one time, the background of my site was a very dark muted green. So dark that on my monitor it virtually looked black. Then one day, I saw it on someone else's computer and it was an awful garish green. From that point on, I switched to black for the site since black will always be black on any monitor.

You will notice that most of the sites I design for artists are not black. But, frankly, I've never found light text against black or any dark color hard to read. What I do find hard to read is a long page of text that fully goes the width of the screen - hard to follow more than hard to read.

[Julie Gerleman]

I know what you mean about feeling like you can't win. That's my least favorite part of being a web developer. You make one change after 10 people have been complaining about something and afterward, most of those 10 are marginally happy but another brand new set of 20 are now noisily unhappy with the change.

By the way, this site could be done up completely in violent shades of fuschia and I'd still be here as much as I could. Because it really is that good.

[Enzie Shahmiri]

Hi Monique,

I looked at your site and like what the way it looks. Navigation is really easy and your work shows well. But.....

You should know that my site used to be black with a soft pale color for the text with lots of personal touches, which I was very proud of, because it was soooo unique (at least that's what I thought!). Then I was told, my site looks to busy, is hard to navigate, etc.... After learning what makes a good web page design and why, it was back to rethinking everything and simplifying.

With that said, I have to agree with Julie's comments. White text on a black background is too harsh on the eye. Although, I for one love slide shows, not everybody will be able to view it and instead get a blank area. I Phones won't show anything flash related. Also check your site in Firefox and make sure everything looks as it should. Firefox, unlike Avant can show things differently or not at all.

Your work is very nice and it deserves to be seen by everyone!

By the way, how do you space the navigation links on the top so they have equal spaces between each link? I couldn't figure that one out.