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Please Review the site I designed in 6 hours.

by Jellypie Software
11 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
Hi All,

My wife is currently completing a Masters Degree in Illustration. One of the course requirements that was suddenly sprung on her was a fully functional website, so I had to design a responsive site for her at very short notice in a very tight time frame.

Can you please let me know your initial impressions of Vikki Gibson - Creative Illustration Portfolio

It's very basic at the moment, but the plan going forward is to add some blog pages with more detailed content about her design work, which should hopefully help with SEO.

Many thanks in advance.
#designed #hours #review #site
  • Profile picture of the author webcosmo
    Nice for the purpose, only loading times are a bit too long.
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  • Profile picture of the author borntowin168
    Ya load time is too long, take me 10s ! But the site looks great!
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  • Profile picture of the author Jellypie Software
    Hmmm... Thanks for the feedback. The loading times are a real worry as I've spent a lot of time trying to get it running as smoothly as possible. I've optimised the site (minifed the css and .js).

    I used Notepad++ to edit the HTML and CSS files in a Themeforest Template. The biggest challenge was finding a template that Mrs G actually liked. The trouble with illustrators is that they can be a real pain in the ass to design for, as they have fixed ideas about what they want and don’t know what that is until they see it. So the approach I took was to show her the responsive Photography sites on Themeforest and get her to pick one she liked, stressing that I would not be able to change the layout or mess around the visual look and feel much if she wanted it quickly. After that, the biggest challenge was optimising the images as these were all CMYK encoded, massive jpegs, as they were designed for print. Once I changed them to RGB and resized them to a max of 1920P horizontal I ran them all though https://tinypng.com/ it reduced the size of the site by about 25meg!

    If just checked the site on the Pingdom speed tester and get the following:


    So I'm not sure what else to improve and where the road block are. Any ideas would be most appreciated!
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  • Profile picture of the author FarNext
    Loading time is fine here. it doesn't take long.

    Now about:

    http://www.vikkigibson.com/work.html

    - Set some page background. Otherwise, it looks like a ghost website.

    - On laptop, the website menu appears at the extreme right side. Unless the visitor sees the
    entire page, he will never come to know about the menu. The menu appears fine on the
    desktop computers (appears horizontally).


    .
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    • Profile picture of the author fulltimewp
      I think it looks very nice.

      I have a few little things I'd work on.

      As mentioned, load time. And the little loading icons are annoying, just let the browser render the page. It's kind of a flashback to the flash days... I saw the loading infiniti icon and though, oh great, it's going to be THAT long...

      On /work.html when you hover on an image the overlay goes to about 75% opacity, then when you mouse out it goes to about 50%. But before you hovered there was no visible overlay. That's a really strange and unexpected behavior. When I mouse out the image should probably return to its pre-hovered state. (FYI I'm running Chrome on OS X)

      Even if I liked something on the site and wanted to reach out to the owner, I'd have to look hard to figure out what to do. There's no call to action and the little hamburger on the right edge is not in a standard position, so users won't be looking for it there. Maybe make the hamburger stand out more. Add some color. Make it bigger. Make it jiggle, lol, something.

      Same thing with the Enter button on the home page. I wanted to scroll at first. Figured out that I couldn't and got confused. Then I saw the button. If you make it obvious you can skip the confusion part. I get the minimalist design, but here it's hurting usability.

      Like I said though, the site looks very nice. It could just be made a little bit easier to use.
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  • Profile picture of the author ddesigns
    Loading time is still bit high, you have to work on it.

    Regarding site design and functionality below is the list of what i feel should be taken care of

    On homepage "Enter" is not much visible, you have to make it more visible

    Once we click enter and then goes to Vikki Gibson - Illustrator the text mentioned on most of the blocks is very hard to read, it is only readable when you hover mouse over the blocks

    When we click on particular block it again takes some time in loading the block contains, secondly there is no button to go back to Vikki Gibson - Illustrator page from particular block, the option you are left with is to click "back" button in the browser.

    On contact us page, do add a contact form as copying your email address and then composing and email to you will be long process for many, so its always good to have a contact us form.

    When i clicked on your Fb icon under right side menu it open fb page twice, same thing happened with your twitter account, i tried it several times but the result was same, so pls rectify that too.

    Overall the design is very good as you have made in such a short time. Good luck with the site...
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  • Profile picture of the author Jellypie Software
    Thanks to everyone for the valuable feedback. It was a bit of an eye opener, just how much of an impact page loading speed can have. Also, the wildly discrepant results that different speed test tools provide. I now have my work cut out optimising all of my sites for speed!
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  • Profile picture of the author totalprocessing.net
    I would eliminate the enter page. That is an extra click that is not necessary, no relevant information, and is poor for SEO.
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    • Profile picture of the author nmwf
      Originally Posted by totalprocessing.net View Post

      I would eliminate the enter page. That is an extra click that is not necessary, no relevant information, and is poor for SEO.
      I agree with this. It's just not necessary at all. Great work, though!
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    • Profile picture of the author Jellypie Software
      I've had a look at SEO for the site and I really can't see how it's going to be possible to supplant any of the existing players for terms like "children's illustrator" or "Designer Fabrics" as many of these are household names with 100,000 of quality back links. It's not really crucial for a site like this anyway, as it's more about who the illustrator shows the site to and how they react to the content. She will mainly be using it as an online portfolio and actively inviting targeted visitors to look at it via email and social media.
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  • Profile picture of the author SKng
    Very nice .. I love it .. the loading times is not that bad here .. well done
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