Please give me some feedback (Phil Ingle Photography)

Hi Phil,

Your site isn't loading for me right now - did something go wrong or is that not the right URL?

The look and feel of your site is more than good. It is striking.

Where you might want to rethink a little is with your Title and site description.

From a search engine perspective your page title is the most important single feature on a Web page.

You currently have "Photographer Wakefield leeds Wedding Portrait Photographers Wedding
Photography Wakefield & Leeds castleford pontefract"

You should certainly do well with that but you could do better.

Your main business is 'Wedding photography" so that should go at the front of the title. Ideally get rid of the reference to portrait photography. That waters down the punch of Wedding photographers and create a second landing page specifically for Portrait photography.

I have done a technical analysis of your page for "wedding photographer leeds" as seen by Google . I used Leeds simply because it is one possibility. I have also uploaded the report which compares areas of your page to those of your top 5 competitors. The results can be seen here :-

http://www.search-engine-optimization-software.co.uk/photographer.mht

Your site has been well indexed by Google and Yahoo as well as Ask and to a lesser extent and you have enough back links to get you started. You have a Google page rank of 2.

I do hope this may have given you food for thought.

Good luck with it all.

Terrible Terry

Your wedding gallery is a tad wide at 3309 pixels here. (Firefox 2, Safari 3, and Opera 9 on Win xp pro.)

Again a comment about the wedding gallery, you should try to keep to the width of the browser window with no side scrolling. Maybe have the images stacked in a block rather than in a long line across the top of the page.

HI Phil,

I love the black and that "torn effect" in the background. I assume you have all that text on the front page for SEO purposes. If not lose it you shouldnt need to scroll that much on a front page at least. Also I really dont like the navigational bar. The text and the gaps look really low quality. Perhaps you could have a horizontal nav bar at the top to break the header form the content. Just an idea though.

Hope that helps. Good luck.

Hi Phil,

as a web designer with a photographic background, your site is of good quality. I only have a few suggestions to make. Although people are here to get information on the website, they're here to see and judge your photos.

The photos you have on the site (not the Porta Album) need to jump out of the screen. Play them up by adding drop shadows or some kind of border that makes they separate from the webpage.

As intellectual property protection, I suggest you incorporate some javascript that will discourage, but not prevent, users from "right-clicking" and saving images that do not have your company watermark.

Navigation buttons are too far apart and font is inconsistent with rest of the page font.

I'm not a fan of Centre alignment, much prefer left alignment.

Currently, your pages do not print on 8.5 x 11 inches paper (in Canada). I suggest either changing your page templates or prepare a printable brochure for your clients.

That's about it. Say Cheese!
Please keep an eye out for my request for site review coming soon.

Jason

Phil,

This critique might be a bit more than what you were looking for. I'm being very honest about your site because I think you need to hear it. If you don't want an honest critique then please stop reading!

I got married last year so I have some experience with wedding photographer sites. And I found most to be poorly designed. This is no exception, to be honest - it's okay, but if your competitors are as bad as the photographers I looked at you definitely have room to impress here.

The black background is okay - black usually works well for photographers but I think wedding photography might be an exception. Think about it - what is the colour of weddings? White. Try your photos on a white background instead and see how they look.

The overabundance of text on the home page makes it look a bit cheap, like it's a long-tail sales pitch. Much of that text is essentially keyword stuffing anyway.

The navigation buttons on the left side look too much like form buttons and the default serif text makes conflict with the silver gradient background. Sometimes experimenting with horizontal scrolling can work but you have to be really careful with that.

Centered text almost never works on the web - keep everything left aligned. Text sizes also vary a lot on the site - try to keep that more consistent. Most of the default body text is about 2 sizes too big.

Really, Phil, all this keyword stuffing just smacks of desperation to me. But I know a bit about SEO, to others it'll probably just look strange. The real content is getting lost in all the keyword spam.

You should do more to encouage brides to contact you. Highlight the contact us link on every page with something like "Want to know more? Contact us to discuss your special day".

I think you should get rid of the spaces in some of your file names. Those are coming through as Wedding%20price%20list.html and I wouldn't be surprised if that trips up search engines (special characters in URL's usually aren't good.)

To get more content on here you should consider writing some articles that could be link-able. They could be about:

• Professional wedding photo adjustments using Photoshop (show people how to make their photos look more professional)
• Getting the most out of your wedding photographer
• Checklist of photos brides should consider asking for - you don't want to get the photos back and realize you don't have one with your dad or something. It's a hectic day so brides should know to be prepared ahead of time.

Just a few ideas - don't be afraid to give away some of your knowledge. It just shows that you know what you're doing.

i really like that you can scroll through pics with the mouse scroller. pictures are nicely displayed as thumbnails and there a few different ways to view each image.

when hitting a button on he side menu, the page reloads each time. there is sometimes a slow change between pages. it might be a good idea to make a "div" for the middle content and just fill that div each time. that way it is more dynamic

I have to agree with Megan on the black background. Weddings are supposed to be a cheerful thing, but the site's color scheme isn't cheerful at all. Some food for thought maybe

Just had another thought, why not try displaying the images using something like ThickBox or Greybox?