NEWBIE.... a website review, would be cool...

benfernandes · #1 07-03-2007, 10:18 AM

Hi there to you all,
I am as you’ll see a new addition to this forum, I am not quite sure why I am here, but it seems like a nice place. I am a London based freelance retoucher with over 17 years experience and am in the process of building a new web site. So I thought I’d ask you guys and gals to post me some initail feedback, as to my work which is varied, also as to what content is good and which is bad...

Any comments will be taken on board so let your fungers do the talking...

Cheers to those who pass by my site (see link below).
The showreel is a tad slow but will give you clues as
to how I retouch my jobs....

Regards

Ben

http://web.mac.com/benfernandes

Guy Thomas · #2 07-03-2007, 09:22 PM

Hi Ben,

I clicked through your pages and thought I would give you a little feedback.

My first, and biggest problem is that you gave us more information about yourself and your experience in your introduction than on your website, so an "About" section would be nice to have.

I am also a firm believer in making it as easy as possible for a customer to contact you. I recommend adding a text footer to all of your pages with contact information.

I was unable to look at your demo reel because Quicktime isn't installed on this (work) PC . The experts say that 97% of the worlds computers have the Flash Player on them, so you may think about going that route with your video instead.

Finally, on a more technical note. It appears you are using 24bit PNG's with transparency, and forcing them to work on IE6 with javascript? The effect works when the page is loaded completely, but it seems that until the last element (thumbnail, video, etc.) loads on the page IE6 users will see the transparency on those images as a pale blue. This makes the text totally unreadable until the page has loaded.

I'm normally not a big fan of text in images, because then none of your words of wisdom can be indexed by a search engine, but if you are attached to the smooth anti-aliasing and plan on keeping the solid black background, you may want to think about turning off the transparency.

Overall, your site looks very nice. The work looks very high end, and it's quite likely that none of your potential clients will be using an old Microsoft PC running IE6.

-Guy

benfernandes · #3 07-04-2007, 02:02 AM

Guy,

I appreciate your comments and am greatful. The Introduction is something I have on my very 1st website but thought I should leave it out on this one.
the old reads as: http://homepage.mac.com/benfernandes/page1/page1.html

As for all your technical help with transparency etc, well that is lost on me as I know nothing and the site is an APPLE iweb template.... no scripting at all for me. It took me 2.5 hours to put everything together. Your words are very helpful for the guys to know who’ll be building the NEW one.

Take care out there in the Middle East.

Ben