www.juliabell.co.uk

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 97

A website for my wife's childrens photography business. Feedback welcome!

NetHosted Staff Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 5655

Rich,

I must say I like the design, right up my street style wise. The pictures look very good too!

Andrew

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 97

Glad you like it! The missus wanted a modern, uncluttered design but of course that makes SEO harder where it's a case of the more text the better. To get around that problem I'm using Google AdWords to generate traffic.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 4:54 pm Post subject:

Very nice looking site that almost achieves the near impossible task of matching the quality of your wife's photography. I particularly like the simple, but well thought out overall layout and also the navbar. (I'd be very interested in how you created the underlying image if it's not a trade secret.)

The only problem I noticed was that in FF 1.0.5 the main body in the prices, contact details, about J&P and testimonials pages is hard up against the left hand side of the browser window on both Windows and Linux. Haven't got a copy of FF 1.7 loaded at the moment so I don't know if that's the same.

Regards,

Pete

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 97

Thanks very much for your kind words. The idea was to keep it simple so as not to distract from the photography so it's nice to know that other people think I've managed it!

The navbar image was positioned using a centred div (using text-align:center). The logo and middle bit of the navbar (i.e with the words on) are actually one image created in Photoshop and I covered with HTML image maps to create the navbar links. Any space to the left or right of the centred div was filled with a repeating image inserted into the Body like this:

body {
background-image: url(images/bg.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-x;
background-color: #000;
}

bg.gif is a 1px wide and just over 100px high copy of the white navbar on a black background to get that seamless white bar running across the page no matter what the browser width. I hope that explains it but ask away if not.

Thanks for out the problem in Firefox which I'd seen a while ago but totally forgotten about! I have had a look at this again and still cannot find what might be causing that. It might be worked around by putting a table align="center" statement in the HTML but I'm trying to use as much CSS as possible. I'll have a play with the CSS and try fixing it.

Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2006 7:06 pm Post subject:

I think you can fix at least some of the centering issues with a css statement along the lines of:

NetHosted Customer Joined: 15 Mar 2005 Posts: 97

Excellent! That worked for everything. I never knew about that useful bit of CSS. Thanks very much.

NetHosted Customer Joined: 13 Jul 2006 Posts: 6

I have to say I like it too. The simple, classic monochromatic design is classy and works well. The progress bars on the thumbnails are very well implemented, tho' I'm personally not a fan of loading all the images in the background - if they're small, they won't take long to load when clicked on; if they're not small, you're eating up bandwidth that ppl on a metered / capped service will be paying for.

Think I've noticed a little buggette though, with Firefox 1.5.0.4. On the testimonials page, scrolling works correctly and the white menu bar scrolls upwards. On the portfolio page, the middle of the menu bar scrolls up and the rest of it gradually shrinks to nothing.. The problem doesn't seem to occur in IE 6.0.2800.1106 but instead there's a script error at line 30 - object expected. Attaching interdev shows it to be "var flashVersion = getFlashVersion();". I'm guessing this is because the referenced file flash_detect.js doesn't exist..

Overall though, big thumbs up & I'm extremely jealous!

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