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Marianna Mills

9 Years Ago

Website Feedback Please

Hi,

I made a new website of my works, and I would like to ask your opinion; if it's work properly, layout, design...etc. What do you think about it so far?

Is the slideshow in the home page is not too slow?

I still need to upload more images in the next few weeks.

http://www.mariannamills.com

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FireFlux Studios

9 Years Ago

Nice site Marianna,

Its very quick, no errors or layout problems on Chrome, and nice and clean.

Few minor things you might want to look at:

1) The image of you on the about me page should have the HTML width and height tags to define the size of the image. When you go into it the first time and your browser doesnt have that image cached yet the text gets pushed around for a second or 2 while it loads the image. If you used the width and height tags, then it will 'reserve' space for the image while it downloads and stops the text jumping around. The same on the News page with the image you use in the link to selfiesbook.

2) Your LinkedIN link doesnt seem to be right. When I click it it tells me 'You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common'. I think you need to link your direct profile url, it should be under your photo when you edit your profile. The link you've used is probably only valid for yourself.

3) You seem to be running the FB script at the bottom of every page, but I cant actually see a page with the FB Like button on, so you could remove that script and the FB stuff I think, might save you a little load time, sometimes that call to FB can be a bit slow.

Other than that, its great! :)

Rob.

 

David Morefield

9 Years Ago

Hi Marianna,

First, I will say that your site is very clean looking and loads fast.

If I had to make a suggestion, it would be that you decide where you want to send people to look at your pictures. What I mean is, you have a lot of links on your page Fine Art America and Etsy included.

I would make the Gallery open your ArtistWebsite page in a new window and eliminate the Links page. If they are on your site, hopefully they will want to see your Gallery. The idea is to convert as much traffic as possible.

In my case, I track my conversions so that I can see how many people are going to my Artistwebsite page in order to look at what I have to offer. If they get turned in circles on your site, they are less likely to visit your FAA page. Streamlining the browsing process in this way has greatly increased the number of conversions to my Artistwebsite and I believe has led to sales.

Here is my site for reference http://fluffyshotme.com

I also try to funnel people from Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and 500px in order to send all of them to where they can buy my prints.

Looks like you have a good start.

 

Murray Bloom

9 Years Ago

I think your site looks great. My site is also hosted by Photium, but you implemented a vastly different look and have discovered some features that I hadn't been aware of, like having images and their titles appear independently in your homepage slideshow. Mmmmm. Nice work!

I didn't immediately notice the functionality issues that Rob and David mentioned, but now see that you have fixed the LinkedIn link.

It appears that David missed the point of what you're doing with your site. You are, like I am, sending people to your personal site and gallery, and not your Artist Website gallery. Once there, they can view your work, and if they elect to purchase something, can click on your purchase link, which then takes them to the corresponding AW page. That way, AW appears as an extension of your images, becoming their sales page. I think that this gives you a lot more control over the sales process, as well as how your images appear to customers.

 

Marianna Mills

9 Years Ago

Rob, thank you for your help.
I've fixed the LinkedIn link. Yes, it was under my photo.
I done something with the FB Like and share button, but not sure if that you was mentioning.
I don't understand about the image size on the about page, because I am not familiar with the HTML. I don't know how to add the width and height tags.

David, thank you for your comments. I've visited your website, and I really like it. You have done a very good job. As Murray mentioned it above, I want to use my AW as a sales page. Because I have tried to use the similar design on my AW page what I am using on my website, I don't really like the grey sides on my AW site. I would like to keep my personal site as my main gallery of my works.
About the links; I will look into that later on how I can fix it. I might just make a few groups to put some of my links in.

Thank you Murray for noticing the titles appear in my homepage slideshow. I was working on that a lot until I figured it out how to achieve that effect.
Yes, as you explained to David, I want to send people to my website and use AW as a sales page. Because I like to have more control over how my art been represented.

 

David Morefield

9 Years Ago

Murray, I understand what you mean by giving you more control over how your images are displayed.

We just have different designs for how we want our sales process to work. For me, it is a more natural transition for someone to click on a "Gallery" tab and be taken to a Gallery link.

The main thing is to define what you want people to do when they visit your site and then try to tailor your site so that you can convert that traffic. Many people put too much focus on getting traffic and they forget that what they want are conversions that lead to sales. Who cares if I had 10,000 visitors to my site last week if I didn't make any sales, right?

I may put too much emphasis on SEO, but organic search traffic is very important for me. This is why I choose to host my own site so that I have complete control of the platform, not just my pictures. I keep tabs on my Alexa ranking as well as other metrics and analyze the keywords that people are using to find my site. I think it is also important to manually submit links to new posts via Google Webmaster Tools, this gets my new post crawled by Google very quickly and has increased my odds of coming up in organic search results.

If you have not already looked at a hosted solution for e-mail, I would highly recommend Google Apps for your @yourdomain e-mail. When you give someone your website and then an e-mail @yahoo or @hotmail, it does not present a very professional image in my opinion. I have my e-mail hosted through Gmail for $5/month. It's the best deal in town if you ask me.

I hope that helps.

 

Mario Carta

9 Years Ago

Very nice Marianna, I like every thing about it, especially your images, beautifully done!

 

FireFlux Studios

9 Years Ago

I cant paste the HTML code here, as the forum doesnt work well with code like that in posts, so I've posted the 'html' bits to paste-bin so it displays properly.

The FB stuff is right at the end of every page, if you look at the HTML its this bit, you can probably remove it all:

http://pastebin.com/qMrgkW4C

With the image, you have this:

http://pastebin.com/VX1qnhps

You should change it to this:

http://pastebin.com/9pPT29PA

And on the news page change the image also, but use width 700, height 192.

Isnt a great problem, just makes the page load a bit better on first view...

Rob.

 

Melissa Bittinger

9 Years Ago

Looks really nice, easy to navigate. One typo I saw was your link to art/photo on etsy, left off the h on photograph. Also, I think the slideshow on the homepage is too slow. I'd almost clicked off the homepage when it started sliding so I stayed but yes, I would say it moves too slow.

 

Marianna Mills

9 Years Ago

David,
thank you for explaining a few things. I've just checked my site and my score is 62/100. I will look into all the suggestions from that site to make it better.

Mario,
thank you so much! It's make me very happy you like my work.

Rob,
Thank you very much for the help. I will try to change it now. Will let you know when I done it.

Melissa,
Thank you for your comment on my website :) I've just corrected the typo on my links page. And I made the slideshow faster, hopefully people will see it now and not clicking away from the home page.

 

Kim Shuckhart Gunns

9 Years Ago

Beautiful website and work Marianna, i also like the your quote in your header i didn't know when I clicked on your purchase area that text could go in our aw headers too. Lots to learn.

 

Marianna Mills

9 Years Ago

Thank you Kim. Very nice of you to check my website out, and I am happy you like it.

 

This discussion is closed.