New responsive site for my paintings

[peebee44]

I have just uploaded my new responsive website to exhibit my paintings.
Very happy with WD11, so easy to do everything.
http://www.paulbennettfineart.com
Feedback welcome.

[angelize]

Very nice! I love the layout and your paintings are beautiful. The daises in particular caught my eye. I have a large clump of Shasta Daisies growing in my back yard.

[Acorn]

I believe that you have, successfully, presented a large number of your paintings in the Gallery all on one page.
I do find that the time to get all of their initial downloads to be too slow.
Perhaps you should split the Gallery into several?

You have 7 rows of 10 paintings with the last row being 11.
I think the use of a grid of Guidelines to top, centre or bottom them would add better balance.
Apologies if you aimed for this effect.

You could also add rollover text to each thumb.

Acorn

[pauland]

I think the gallery images are really too small when viewed on a phone-sized screen - I think it would help to present those gallery thumbnails as a larger image.

Very workmanlike site. I hope you have many sales from it.

..I should add that I think to sell paintings, the larger the thumbnail the better and people do like to know a little about the painting, not just look at an image itself. The lightboxes are quite small on my screen and I'm sure I'm not viewing these images as well as I could.

For example, the 'Drought Country' image could have a little insight as to why you decided to paint it and the kind of country and people it depicts. This will incline people more favourably to the subject - after all an image is not just about the artist, or the qualities of the painting but about the way it makes someone feel when they look at it. For 'Drought Country' you can draw me into that scene with a little background to the painting.

I really feel that selling art, however accomplished, is as much about selling a backstory and state of mind as it is about the quality of the work itself. I can see you're a talented guy. The more you expose of yourself as an artist and of the backstory of the images, the better the site will work for you, I feel.

All that from someone who has never sold an artwork himself.. .. good luck.

[gwpriester]

Love the site and the paintings.

Don't love the green though. I would make the theme colors neutral, tan, gray, black, so the background does not compete with the paintings.

[pauland]

On the performance front - it took probably a couple of minutes to load the gallery and most of my time was spent looking at the attached image. I'd suggest using larger thumbnails, with multiple pages for the gallery. This will improve load times. I wonder if people will just leave when they just see what looks like broken links?



There are over 320 images on the page and I think it's the round-trip loading of all these images that don't help the loading speed.

[pauland]

I would make the theme colors neutral, tan, gray, black, so the background does not compete with the paintings.

That's an excellent point. You might also consider using the 'blacked out' popup style so people can concentrate on the pop-up image with no background distractions.

[wizard509]

I for one like your site. I am looking at it on my iPad and every thing loads very quickly. Beautiful work Paul. Good luck, I hope it pays off for you.

[peebee44]

Thank you all for the constructive criticism, I will take it all on board as I have two more websites to do.
I hope as I get more proficient with WD11 I will be able to include many more fixes. Thank you again.

[pauland]

You are a talented artist - good luck with the other sites.