Please have a look and give advice

[garnet01]

A simple website still needs some more pages (clients, etc..) but could you guys give me a shout and say how you feel it looks.
Cheers
www.garethpritchard.co.uk

[Markzebra]

Looks good to me Gareth.

[Janko]

Site and work are both very nice-- Just saw your dairy cow shot in this months PDN.

[garnet01]

Cheers Janko and Markzebra
What's PDN?

[Janko]

Its a photo publication here in the US. They have a bunch of contests all the time in this issue they published the winners of their pix digital imaging contest and the cow was one of the winners...

they don't have the winners published online yet but its out in print.

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/feature...010-1034.shtml

[Mike Needham]

Great work and a slick site, what's not to like? Is it search engine friendly being Flash driven? just curious as I was thinking about changing my portfolio from html.

[garnet01]

Hey Mike
It's from a company called folioedit (it says in the bottom right corner, should be a link) Really easy and quick to do, but a little pricey.
Cheers Janko, thanks for the good news, I've never heard of the magazine but nice to be talked about.
Easy

[jeljones]

Very easy to use. Simple and elegant.

[garnet01]

Just seen it on their website cheers for the heads up Janko

[deZines]

I really like your logo, and the flash slide shows are great. The white just seems way to stark though. I use a hosting site called SmugMug. It has different pricing packages, you can create your own design or there are some really good templates. They have the flash galleries as well as shopping carts embedded, so your clients can order shots right from there as well. It's kind of multipurpose (portfolio as well as shop).

http://www.smugmug.com/

[garnet01]

Cheers deZines, my father designed the logo a while back and I find it quite amusing. I really like the white that was the reason I went for the company I did, I know what you mean about stark but I've grown to really like it.
Selling work would be good but sadly most of my work is commercial and so not mine to sell.
Cheers and take it easy!

[myrestor]

I love the minimalist look you went for, very nice design and beautiful photos.
The initial load of the page took a while for me (somewhere around 30 seconds or so) longer than just about any site I've been to. Also the flash galleries load the pictures a bit slow. Flash websites have a tendancy to load slow. An alternative that would work for you would be using Jquery instead of flash. Jquery utilizes javascript to accomplish its effects, and loads in a fraction of the time that a flash website does.

Here's the thing. Your using Foliostop for your website, if you go to the foliostop web page at the bottom is a little shadowbox with pictures in it and arrows off to the sides so you can scroll through. That shadowbox is all jquery. Notice how when you click on it it doesn't have to load?

the jquery stuff is all server side flash is client side. client side stuff runs when the person viewing your site clicks on it or loads the page. Server side stuff such as jquery loads when the page loads. So after the page loads when people click on stuff bam it opens or displays the shadow box. Flash has its uses but, for what your doing, if you are able to I'd recommend using jquery instead.

Just my 2 cents but beautiful site all the same.

[garnet01]

Hey cheers myrestor, just to clarify do you mean the foliostop I'm using is jquery or flash?
Sorry this is the first time I've heard of jquery.
Gareth

[garnet01]

Or is jquery a way of viewing websites, like a different version of flash?
Gareth

[myrestor]

Hey sorry for the confusion there. I meant that the foliostop your using is flash.
Jquery is for lack of better wording, shorthand for the web programing language javascript. It alows you to use javascript for many of the things you see flash used for such as photo galleries.

The catch is you don't have to know any javascript to use it. You do need to have a basic understanding of html, and css code however. It isn't flash at all, but like flash, is often used for animation effects, as well as other things.

If it sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can check out www.w3schools.com to learn the html and css basics if you don't already know them. also jquery.com is a fantastic resource for all things jquery. On it you can design all sorts of things that you can use in your website, and then download the files for those items.

Any Javascript for a web page loads before you see the web page load. Since jquery is essentially a shorthand version of javascript, there's no waiting when you use jquery for your photogallery or menus for example. once the page loads its all ready when you want it. no slow buffering or load times like with flash. Oh and Jquery is free, although there are a few companies out there that have some jquery effects you can buy if you really want to.

[garnet01]

Cheers man!
I do find this really interesting but in all honesty it's a little over my head, that's what I liked about the foliostop as it's a program on the computer hard drive and takes a few second to change or update. It is annoying it takes so long to load for some people, you get a misshapen view when you only use super fast broadband. It's only meant to be for a few people to view, just thought it'd be quicker than biking a paper portfolio.
The rough with the smooth I suppose.
Anyway cheers for the advice guys, I really appreciate it.
Gareth

[DanTaylor]

Simple and very nice, but logo is not very good.

[garnet01]

Insightful.

[Repairman]

I like the logo - traditional with a modern twist.

[garnet01]

Cheers repairman my father made it.

[plugsnpixels]

Very zen site, great examples, displays fine on an iPad.

[garnet01]

Oh cool that's good to know, I still haven't seen an ipad, is there any banding on them?