New Website - Requesting Critiques

[Jamie Clark]

Hello All,

Attached is a link to a website that my company launched earlier this year:

www.thecaminus.com

A bit of background on the site - it is the first half of a site designed both to market prints, and to generate business for architectural photography services. The second part of the site dealing with the services component will follow later this year, and will follow the design template already established.

In terms of the site design, I was looking for a simple and elegant way to display my images without a lot of background noise or distractions. The grayscale colour scheme was selected to ensure the navigation elements did not clash with the images themselves. I chose to divide the subject matter into the three primary categories of my work.

I am currently having a few issues on the site tweaked, such as the pageload times, so please disregard that if you can. Any comments or suggestions are much appreciated.

Regards,

Jamie

[Peter Wm. Richardson]

Hi Jamie:
With my system, the site loads and navigates interminably slowly, however this is more a factor of my internet computer and my connection,dial up. Once up, the images are outstanding and I can see how the site should work, which I think would be fine on a better system and connection. Personally, I do not like Flash, but I think the site is well designed and looks great. Good Job!
Cheers,
Peter
Peter Wm. Richardson
Photojournalist
peterw@journalist.com

[Jamie Clark]

Thanks for the critique Peter, and I do agree that Flash can be a difficult choice, as it is tempting to get carried away with animations and graphics that detract from the product, the photography. My web designer and I have tried to keep the flash componentry as subtle as possible.

[andrewr]

Looks very nice Jamie. I'm usually not a fan of flash sites either, but you can certainly accomplish much more by using it. You've done a good job of keeping the flash subtle, but I think maybe the preloader graphic is a bit too subtle. I was waiting for a page to load and was thinking "it would be nice if there was a preloader graphic so I know how much longer I have to wait." I think I looked at few pages before I realized there was one, it's just very subtle and I didn't notice it right away.

It's not a big deal, and that's really the only criticism I could think of.

Cheers,

Andrew

[2eyesopen]

Jamie,
In my blog I did a post on what consists of a visitor and search engine friendly website for photographers. What you have here is a pretty site that is completely search engine non-friendly. Flash based sites are practically unreadable and therefore un-indexable by search engines. ie: Google
Here is a diagnostic report of the page.