www.juliabell.co.uk

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

A website for my wife's childrens photography

business. Feedback welcome!

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 7017

Rich,

I must say I like the design, right up my street style wise. The pictures look very good too!

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

Glad you like it! The missus wanted a modern, uncluttered design but of course that makes SEO harder where it's a case of the more text the better. To get around that problem I'm using Google AdWords to generate traffic.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 5:54 pm Post subject:

Very nice looking site that almost achieves the near impossible task of matching the quality of your wife's photography. I particularly like the simple, but well thought out overall layout and also the navbar. (I'd be very interested in how you created the underlying image if it's not a trade secret.)

The only problem I noticed was that in FF 1.0.5 the main body in the prices, contact details, about J&P and testimonials pages is hard up against the left hand side of the browser window on both Windows and Linux. Haven't got a copy of FF 1.7 loaded at the moment so I don't know if that's the same.

Regards,

Pete

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

Thanks very much for your kind words. The idea was to keep it simple so as not to distract from the photography so it's nice to know that other people think I've managed it!

The navbar image was positioned using a centred div (using text-align:center). The logo and middle bit of the navbar (i.e with the words on) are actually one image created in Photoshop and I covered with HTML image maps to create the navbar links. Any space to the left or right of the centred div was filled with a repeating image inserted into the Body like this:

body {
background-image: url(images/bg.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-color: #000;
}

bg.gif is a 1px wide and just over 100px high copy of the white navbar on a black background to get that seamless white bar running across the page no matter what the browser width. I hope that explains it but ask away if not.

Thanks for out the problem in Firefox which I'd seen a while ago but totally forgotten about! I have had a look at this again and still cannot find what might be causing that. It might be worked around by putting a table align="center" statement in the HTML but I'm trying to use as much CSS as possible. I'll have a play with the CSS and try fixing it.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 8:06 pm Post subject:

I think you can fix at least some of the centering issues with a css statement along the lines of:

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

Excellent! That worked for everything. I never knew about that useful bit of CSS. Thanks very much.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 13 Jul 2006 Posts: 6

I have to say I like it too. The simple, classic monochromatic design is classy and works well. The progress bars on the thumbnails are very well implemented, tho' I'm personally not a fan of loading all the images in the background - if they're small, they won't take long to load when clicked on; if they're not small, you're eating up bandwidth that ppl on a metered / capped service will be paying for.

Think I've noticed a little buggette though, with Firefox 1.5.0.4. On the testimonials page, scrolling works correctly and the white menu bar scrolls upwards. On the portfolio page, the middle of the menu bar scrolls up and the rest of it gradually shrinks to nothing.. The problem doesn't seem to occur in IE 6.0.2800.1106 but instead there's a script error at line 30 - object expected. Attaching interdev shows it to be "var flashVersion = getFlashVersion();". I'm guessing this is because the referenced file flash_detect.js doesn't exist..

Overall though, big thumbs up & I'm extremely jealous!

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

After much prevarication from me and 'encouragement' from the missus I finally pulled my finger out and re-designed the site:

http://www.juliabell.co.uk

The aim was to provide more information on the service provided, show more photography, and update the look and feel to be a bit fresher. As usual, I've gone for a minimal style design with regards to artwork/graphics.

I *think* it's just about done although I do need to add some AJAX so the testimonial quotes change randomly. There's probably a few bugs here and there and I know of one corrupt image in the home page slideshow due to an incomplete FTP upload (not a NH problem - my PC crashed midway through!). Any comments/bug reports gratefully received.

It should work well on most, if not all, major browsers. A slight margin tweak was needed for IE6 for which I've used conditional comments in the HTML to feed it another style sheet.

Something that might interest web designers is that I've used some elements of the 960 Grid System

for the first time. This framework allows you to easily build and change grid based CSS layouts. This also provides pre-built AJAX components which I'll use as mentioned above.

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 9:41 am Post subject:

Congratulations on your centennial post.

With regard to the new site; I'm seeing a slightly distracting inconsistency on clicking through to the 'client galleries' page.

In FF this shows up with the loss of the narrow vertical white band on either side of the header, to be replaced by a broad white strip either side of the bottom quarter of the header.

In IE7/Google Chrome I simply lose the vertical white band across the whole depth of the header on both sides. (Apologies if this description is a bit imprecise - screen shots available on request.)

Also the spacing between the text in the top navigation bar acts as a link to the home page. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but it can be a little puzzling if you are sloppy with the mouse.

Regards, Pete

PS I'm not sure if you are currently working on it, but the navigation bar has a distinctly unstable feel to it. At least a couple of times I have ended up on a page different to the one I was expecting to.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

Heh, I never noticed that milestone!

NetHosted Staff Joined: 24 Jun 2005 Posts: 1021

I'd echo Pete's sentiments here, the site is great but a few problems with the navigation bar. One reproducable one I have come across is when on the contact page, if you click the about image it takes you to the index.

Very much like the site design though, once the menu is sorted it'll be great

Regards,

Darryl

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

The more I think about it the more I think I'll rip that out tonight and replace it with a CSS based menu. The font in that image for the menu items isn't used anywhere else in the new site either so it's just a bit odd from a design perspective.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 148

Right, the menu change is done... did quite a lot of work on the Client Gallery page too which was inconsistent from the rest of the site. That should look a lot better now although I think there's still a small positioning related bug with the logo in some browsers - although not IE6!

Hmmm... wondering if I should ditch the bottom text-based menu now. It's a hangover from the days when menus used images and lots of javascript instead of CSS and designers needed ensure that SEs could crawl all site links. Of course, the top menu is all HTML/CSS based so that isn't necessary anymore. Thoughts anyone?

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2009 12:40 pm Post subject:

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