Website Updates, Thoughts appreciated

[Andrew Stannard]

Hi,

I just added a new section to my website: Photo Articles

The purpose of these is to provide some in depth information about a few selected photos. There's only two articles at the moment, but I plan to expand to a decent number over the next few weeks.

Anyway, I would really appreciate anyone's thoughts on the contents of the articles - particularly the balance of technical info to artistic info. Too much of one and not enough of the other? Maybe I should have a few other mini photos in the articles, alternative compositions etc?

The longer term plan (hopefully before christmas) is to add paypal to my site for buying prints, and at this point these articles will also start to act a means of having special offers on some prints (bit like a 'print of the month' type concept). If anyone has any view as to whether this sounds like a good plan or not, I'd also be interested.


Thanks for any thoughts,

 

[Sean DeMerchant]

I have looked at one page: http://www.astannard.com/gallery_links.htm

From this I have 3 website suggestions (ignoring content and focusing on correctness and ease of user interaction).

1) The page is decent looking in a text viewer, but would greatly be helped by alt tags on the images. i.e.,

http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools...rl=http://www.astannard.com/gallery_links.htm

Note how the image links read with image names rather than helpful text. This will help improve the user experience and search engine readability.

2) Your links to the galleries should be more than just the image, make the text a link too. Let users be sloppy with their clicks to see what they want and they are more likely to stay (easier to use rather than searching for that @#$%@#$ing link). At a minimum, a continue to gallery link at the end of each paragraph should exist. Confusing users or making them search for links is a great way to lose visitors.

3) Do NOT use the XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD unless you are going to code to the XHTML standard. Your page contains errors for this DTD (xmnls missing, alt tags missing, and an unterminated string constant). The W3C has a validator to help with this:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http:%2/www.astannard.com/gallery_links.htm

some thoughts soley on the web aspect rather than the writing,

Sean

 

[Sean DeMerchant]

I should note the site is clean and simple and works without JavaScript which is a HUGE plus from both a user and search engine perspective.

A quick look at the galleries (okay, one of them) shows a lot of images without descriptions which the search engines will see as a nearly empty page. You should have some text so search engines have a guess about what the image is like:

http://www.astannard.com/lakedistrict2.php?current_filename=2006_02_AS0260.jpg

You also need to change the title to be unique for every page from a script or search engines are likely to not index all the pages.

more thoughts, <smile>

Sean

 

[Andrew Stannard]

Hi Sean,

Thanks for the comments - much appreciated.

Have addressed point 1 & 2 from your first post. Think all my images are now covered by alt tags, and the full area of text should be a link on the gallery page - hopefully without changing colour (tested on firefox and IE7).

Will check the XHTML stuff and make sure my pages will validate, one of the original aims of doing the website was to learn some XHTML, so ought to make sure I have it right!


The missing descriptions of the images is something that I'm currently working through. The PHP gallery pages actually grab this from the IPTC data, so I'm slowly working my way through in Lightroom adding this info.

The tip about the unique title pages is great - never thought of this and probably explains why my gallery pages aren't getting listed to easily. Again should hopefully be easy enough to add as it's all PHP scripted.


Cheers,

 

[Sean DeMerchant]

You are welcome. I should also note there are some nice shots in there.

Will check the XHTML stuff and make sure my pages will validate, one of the original aims of doing the website was to learn some XHTML, so ought to make sure I have it right!

XHTML 1.0 Transitional is more user friendly and allows some time saving constructs while still retaining the power of XML (i.e., the validators can validate more of the code).

The missing descriptions of the images is something that I'm currently working through. The PHP gallery pages actually grab this from the IPTC data, so I'm slowly working my way through in Lightroom adding this info.

You also need to ensure that all escape sequences for special characters are properly terminated with a semi-colon. You can find notes of this plus the need for unique ids for page elements (two left arrow ids) at:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbo....php?current_filename=2006_08_AS3240-edit.jpg

Escaping things is necessary, especially for ampersands (&) in HTML that should be written as & when in X/HTML. You might find the following command helpful:

http://us.php.net/htmlentities

The tip about the unique title pages is great - never thought of this and probably explains why my gallery pages aren't getting listed to easily. Again should hopefully be easy enough to add as it's all PHP scripted.

Using mod-rewrite (Apache) or some other method can help you get unique URI's for every page which helps w/ search engines indexing every page.

have fun,

Sean

 

[Andrew Stannard]

Hi,

Whether it was worth the fiddling around or not might be questionable, but all my pages are now validating as XHTML strict.

Have also made the titles for the gallery pages reflect the photo being viewed, so they're all now unique, including the ones you get when you click on a photo for an even bigger version. I've already noticed a couple more images get indexed by google, so hopefully the changes are helping.

Have also added another 'Photo Article' as linked to in the original post, with hopefully more to come soon.


Thanks for the advice,