Please review www.maryneale.com

[theneale]

Hi,

Just finished working on http://theneales.elementfx.com/maryneale/ (also aliased to www.maryneale.com and www.maryneale.co.uk) for my wife's sewing and dressmaking business - all feedback welcome! Some of the photos are still a work in progress but I hope to have demonstrated some of the great features of Wordpress without making it look too much like just another Wordpress site.

Comments welcome - TIA!

David.

 

[anamik.maju44]

Nice Website... Keep it up!

 

[theneale]

We've done a few updates and added more pages - perhaps you could have another look and let us know how we're doing...
The main site is at www.maryneale.co.uk

For those that are interested, the site is built on the latest version of Wordpress (3.5.2) using the Catch Everest free theme with some CSS tweaks to beautify it and make the text clearer to read. We're not professional photographers so the graphics are always going to be a work in progress but we're gradually improving them as we get them.

 

[essellar]

I've only got one beef, really, and that's the target="_blank" in the on-page internal links. Since each of the target pages has a link back to the category page, that can leave an inexperienced user with a forest of open pages/tabs and the idea that they've somehow done something wrong. Anyone who wants to open a new tab can right-click or middle-click. (It's enough of a usability issue that the target attribute was deprecated in XHTML and dropped altogether in HTML 5.)

The photography will come. If you are interested in making it really top-drawer on a budget, I'd suggest taking a look at Phill McCordall's tutorials on YouTube (at http://www.youtube.com/user/pmcc150 ). Phill's retired now and living in France, but once upon a time he was one of Europe's top commercial photographers. For the past couple of years he's been busy showing people how, with modern digital cameras, people can do the sorts of things he used to do with a team of assistants and lorry loads of equipment with a few pounds well-spent at the hobby and hardware stores. (And you can pop by ItchyPhoto.com to ask specific questions and get help from at least two retired pros and a gang of enthusiastic amateurs.)

 

[theneale]

Thanks for that - believe it or not I didn't put the the internal links in myself so didn't realise they were all opening a new tab/window. I can only guess that my wife (who actually added the pages with internal links herself - I showed her a bit of HTML to get her going) must have copied the code from my other web site where there are a few links that deliberately open in a new tab!

My first reaction after she added these pages was in fact that there were too many links and the site could end up with too much unmaintainable spaghetti.

Thanks for the photography tips - will take a look at that video. Our first photos were taken indoors in winter with a basic digital camera and the quality was limited accordingly but now we've got some decent weather we'll try again soon.

Edit: I think I've removed all the "target=_blank" links now!

 

[theneale]

We stayed with friends last weekend - they live in a beautiful house and have decent cameras too! Took a rack of clothes along and had a go at producing some better photos. The front page banner shots are now much improved - comments on the site are still welcome!

 

[nocrisis110mb26]

Nice, good luck!