Review archshrk.com

The site is easy on the eyes and fairly easy to navigate. It’s a little bit too busy for my taste with all the ads. etc. The gallery is nice but I think an improvement would be to add frames to your photos. It would make the photos stand out much more. I would also be much more selective with the amount of photos you show. Pick the best and don’t show the “bad” (eyes closed etc.) ones. I think quality is more important than quantity and you would still have enough nice photos to show off.
The possibility to translate to different languages is a nice touch but are many people really using that?

Just my 2 cents

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Thanks, the gallery is overloaded but weeding them out will take time. As for image frames, what would you suggest? The main reason I don’t use frames has to do with alignment issues in IE vs FF.

The translator was added because many of the visitors to my site are from Europe and thought it would be nice, but I suppose they probably read English very well (even if I don’t write it very good – haha)

The ads were included to hopefully offset some of my costs but so far have not been very effective. Been thinking about removing the hosting ads or move them to a ‘special page’ or something.

I have no idea what the site is about because I can’t read it. The font size is too small! Flexible font sizing (or lack thereof) should be well thought out and tested by a designer. You might want to check out this thread for some discussion, including responses from Zeldman and Meyer about why they do what they do which really, REALLY doesn’t work for me. Your site suffers from the same glitch. The bug that’s causing it is discussed late on in the thread: https://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=309991

The other thing that doesn’t work is designing exclusively for 1024 x 768. Even though I have a bigger screen and a resolution of 1280 x 1024, I rarely keep a browser window maximized. Visitors with 800 x 600 have to deal with a horizontal scrollbar which is a BIG no-no. See if you can make the middle column flexible width to adjust to any window size.

I also agree that the look is a little too scattered. Even though the block dividers are repeated throughout the site, the eye does not see the fragmented elements as a cohesive unit.

Hope that helps.

earther, I will definately look into the font issue you mentioned. I see that the wordpress dashboard does not suffer this problem and the subtle difference is not going to ruin my site. As for the page size itself, I originally had the 800px layout but found it limited the gallery look I was going for. Plus, most of my visitors were at 1280 so it seemed wasteful (I hate scrolling down). I understand that many people (like you) do not maximize their browsers but I felt the larger default was better. Good critiques, keep them comming.