Website Update

I've just spent some time today going over my website and changing a few things. I was wondering if you all could take a look at it and visit the various pages and let me know your thoughts. *kisses* to all who do.

http://wildmaven.org

Must be a summer time thing.  Seems like there are a lot of us redoing websites right now.

Overall I think it looks really good.  Did you do it all yourself?  Start with a template?  The HTML is very light and clean without a whole bunch of extra markup, and that's a good thing. 

I agree with Susie about your front page.  It seems like it should be more on an introduction to you and your services, whether that's text saying "this is who Marian is" or images.  Maybe add a clients tab with information on logging in to their proofs.  Two ProofBuddy tricks for you.  One, if you don't want your clients to have to login you can add ?p=passcode to the end of the link and it will log them in automatically.  So if their passcode was sparky, the link would be index.php?p=sparkey.  It's also fairly easy to put a login form on another page, like a clients page, and have them be able to login from there. 

Do you really do on site session without charging anything?  If that's the case you really need to be charging more for your prints. 

The cropping sample is a great idea.  I've got something similar, but it's so buried on my site that nobody ever sees it.  I like that you've got it right up front. 

You need more images.  If I'm thinking about hiring you for portraits and click on Portrait Info I'd hope to see some samples.  Same thing on the techniques page.  Pointillism sounds like it'd make a really interesting image, but in just words it's hard to get the full idea.

And it's a personal preference, but I've never been big on about pages that talk about the photographer / artist in the third person.  When I'm trying to book a portrait or wedding client it's as much about selling myself as it is selling the final prints so I want my personality to come through as much as possible.  Of course I don't have an about page on my site yet so maybe I can't really talk.  And a picture of you either behind a camera or working on one of your art pieces would work really well on this page. 

On the contact form change the email address to something @wildmaven.org?  Having a Yahoo address screams amateur.  I would also suggest making the link clickable and taking out the "(remove the spaces)" part.  There are very few tricks that email scraper spiders don't know about and can work around.  What I've done is setup an email address just for my site, installed a pretty good spam filter in Outlook, and just accept that 95% plus of what comes into that account is going to be spam.  By the time it's filtered maybe 2 or 3 spam emails get through to my inbox a week.  The idea is you want it to be as easy for a potential client to contact you as possible. I'd probably ditch the captcha code on the contact form for the same reason.

Bob's right, although if you want to stay with your sentence you're missing a semicolon.  It's "Serving Belfair, Allyn, Hoodspourt, and Union, WA; and other Hood Canal and North Mason County locations."

Looks way better, your front page is now a front page, I like the picture of you, and the blog is - well interesting, lol.  That's a great blog entry actually.