Just Give Me Money

No offense, but edit your work, you have way too much work on your site. Edit your work down to maybe 20 or so really strong images, that way a gallery can focus on something, presuming that that is why you have a website. GoLive isn't a bad way of making your site, you just have to make it more manageable by going simpler. Make it about the work and not a fancy look, it's a tuff balance.

 

You should learn HTML and CSS. Learn them somewhat simultaneously if you can, because if you just learn HTML, you'll find that once you get to CSS you wasted a lot of time learning antiquated crap that CSS does better. The less you do with HTML and the more you do with CSS, the faster your site will load (because the CSS file is one file that styles all the pages it is linked to). A great resource is www.w3.org. If you don't want to learn them, just learn Dreamweaver which writes the code for you.

 

Good suggestions from Phil and Jeremias. I agree that you could edit down some of the work, particularly the less fully conceived projects. I think having your major work showcased is what Jeremias is saying, that way you have some control over the impression of someone who views the site. By all means leave a sampling of the other work, but only the strongest pieces.

As for Phil's suggestions, they are worth considering. At a certain point actually understanding some code helps a ton. CSS is endlessly useful, but difficult to master. I used to use golive, but find dreamweaver to be superior if only because it writes clean code that someone can actually read. My easiest advice would be to learn at least what CSS does, some basics, but then how it works in dreamweaver.

If you are intent on keeping a lot of your work on the site (which I assume is true,) you should consider some kind of gallery script, whether it is flash (like on my site) or an image swap function with a preloader script using dreamweaver. That way a new page won't have to load for every click of an image and your site will run faster. I use simpleviewer pro, there is a free, less customizable version online, and that should work fine if you decide to try that route. It is very easy if you are good at following instructions.

If you decide to learn some CSS, let me know and I'll send you links to where I learned it. If you just need help or code troubleshooting also feel free to let me know.

 

isn't it great how being a photographer also means we have to be web designers too? grr.. good luck Al i don't have any real new suggestions to offer but some thoughts of encouragement. it is really hard to keep up with all the web stuff and programs but i think what the guys have said will help and i plan too look into some of those choices for my own site down the road. good luck!

 

thanks everyone! yes, I know I need to pare it down a little (or a lot!) so a bunch of those bodies of work are going to get buried in there where as only the most current is going to be on the main page (I was thinking about having a link to an older-work gallery page; Lay of the Land is my current body of work in progress, but I'm shopping the Scenic Overlooks & Tow Show pretty heavily right now. Plus I've been selling prints from my Trip and Ride series through the internet, and hate to lose them completely. Those sales are enough to make me hesitate to change formats too much.

My biggest gripe is all the thumbnails loding takes forever - I think I'm going to go the dreamweaver route and try to figure out what Jay is talking about with the gallery script stuff. Is the simpl viewer pro a plug in? Also, any suggestions on a book or something for Dreamweaver -- I've never even looked at it before.

 

If those thumbnails are your biggest concern, I can see why. Their file size is huge (for a thumb). Most seem to be in the 25-30KB range, when at that size they should be 1-2 KB at most. If you resave all of those using the "Save for web" in photoshop and re-upload you will already have a MUCH faster site.

Best way to find a book is to look around at them at a book store, but I don't know any off the top of my head that are must-haves. As for scripts, they are easy to use, seriously, but the customizations are limited unless you know some more serious code. They are not technically plug-ins, though they generally plug-within the html.

For now, re-save the thumbs and speed up your site until you figure out what exactly what you want to do.

 

thanks, Jay! You're my HERO!