New Portfolio Site for crit

nowinowski

New Member
My name is Nathan. I'm a designer living and working in Denver, Co. I just put up a new site at Nowinowski Designs , and I would like any feedback. Also the site should be working in all modern browsers so if it is not working correctly in a given browser please let me know.

Thanks,

Nathan
 
Sick site dude. Awesome.

I would like to see the disciplines Capped Up maybe? Print, Branding, etc.

Maybe seperate them with something else other than commas, Print | Branding or something.

Nice work.

(This will get moved to the critique section ;))
 
I like it, it simply puts your work out there.

The body font doesn't really do it for me, but that's a nice site :)
 
Everything is far too big, and the navigation needs making more apparent. Scale it down so you there are no scroll bars on a 1024 monitor. It's big but not a good big, the images are too much and make it a hard site to spend time on. If you want to see large imagery used well on a single page site check Danny Blackman // est. 1985


EDIT: Another note on the nav - you need to link to the other sections as well as 'top' so users don't have to go to the top before they can go anywhere else.
 
Harry said:
Everything is far too big, and the navigation needs making more apparent. Scale it down so you there are no scroll bars on a 1024 monitor. It's big but not a good big, the images are too much and make it a hard site to spend time on. If you want to see large imagery used well on a single page site check Danny Blackman // est. 1985


EDIT: Another note on the nav - you need to link to the other sections as well as 'top' so users don't have to go to the top before they can go anywhere else.

I was about to say the same thing, it is more of a consistency issue, the 2 images i clicked were the tattoo, massive and dylan, tiny by comparision. Dylan was an acceptable size, but it then seemed small.

Also a back and forward on the images would also be awesome, like...

my friend, mission photographic (awesome photographer have a look around his site) or another local face Bendidit.
 
Harry said:
Everything is far too big, and the navigation needs making more apparent. Scale it down so you there are no scroll bars on a 1024 monitor. It's big but not a good big, the images are too much and make it a hard site to spend time on. If you want to see large imagery used well on a single page site check Danny Blackman // est. 1985


EDIT: Another note on the nav - you need to link to the other sections as well as 'top' so users don't have to go to the top before they can go anywhere else.

Love that Danny Blackman website
 
I also think it's all a bit too big. But I like the concept of cutting up that main image, very original. :up:

Oh and your favicon reminds me of the Creattica favicon.
 
Thats not bad at all.

But,

I'm I the only one getting sick of every single site having 'Hello. I'm Blah blah and I make blah blah'.... yawn.
 
Dont take this the wrong way as I'm a programmer first and we don't have any imagination, but normally sites like that make me, err.... hows the best way to put this....throw up TBH.

But I don't know, I actually like this one!!!!! :up:
Looking at it from a coding and usability point of view however TBH it is a nightmare, as that is my area. Harry, god why am I just agreeing with him all the time lately I don't know, is right. The images are too big, Maybe reducing them a tad, but regardless of that from a usability point of view, the top nav does need padding in the middle, I wasn't actually sure they were links TBH as they are the same as the headings which aren't links. Just in grey and that is not enough for a normal dumbass user, and yes all users are dumbasses, at least add padding in between them to make them 2 different words.

But coding wise ~
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en" />
Is pointless as this ~
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
Has already done it for you so can be safely removed.

I would also change your html tag to ~
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"lang="en" dir="ltr">
As that tells user agents which way the text is read on the page.

I would change this ~
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
To~
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
As iso-8859-1, or Latin-1, is a sub division, I'm pretty sure that is the right term, of the utf-8 character encoding format so as utf-8 supports more character encodings that is the better option here.

I would simply change this ~
<div id="top_page">
<a name="top"></a> </div>

To simply ~
<div id="top"></div>
As I am pretty sure that is being used for the jump link, and having an empty link is going to sound crap to ppl with disabilities and TBH hated by the search engines, that I suppose is more semantically correct as well.

I would change this whole section to ~
<div id="header_sec_header">
<h1>hello</h1>
</div>
<div id="header_sec_content">
<p class="intro"> My name is Nathan Nowinowski. I am a designer living and working in Denver, Colorado.


To ~
<h1>Hello <span>My name is Nathan Nowinowski, I am a designer living and working in Denver, Colorado. </span></h1>
Notice the comer in the span after your name. But from a search engine point of view the h1 has weight so for better rankings you want your name, what you do, and where you are in there.

Some CSS will need to be changed.
This may do it but you will need to check it.
h1 span{display:inline;font-size:0.6em}
That should give you the same effect, if not a position of relative then move the bottom up should do it, what ever that is better anyway. I'm sure Harry will come out with the perfect solution without even thinking about it, god he is the vain of my life recently here on DF. :lol:

This would be better in a mailto: link.
So change this ~
email: [n.nowinowski(at)gmail]
to ~
<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[n.nowinowski(at)gmail]</a>

Spam harvesters these days will know that n.nowinowski(at)gmail is still an email TBH. In fact I could create one that would pick that up in a very short amount of time.

This whole section here ~
email:[n.nowinowski(at)gmail]<br/> phone: 434.760.2929
Should be in an address tag as it is contact info to be semantically correct.
So I would change it to ~
<address>email: <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[n.nowinowski(at)gmail]</a> <br/> phone: 434.760.2929</address>

This whole section here ~
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/pcirebrandcompbig.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/pcirebrandcomp.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/karshbig.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/karsh.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/jvcsiteredesign.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/jvcsiteredesignth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/bottlertp.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/bottlertpth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/logos.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/logosth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mag2.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mag2th.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mag3.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mag3th.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mag4.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mag4th.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/manray.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/manrayth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mgmt.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/mgmtth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/msf.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/msfth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/neko.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/nekoth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/nmpa.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/nmpath.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/sketch1.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/sketch1th.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/sketchrightspread.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/sketchrightth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>
<a class="images" href="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/wilco-poster.jpg" rel="lightbox" title="..."><img src="http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/wilco-posterth.jpg" alt="..."></img></a>

Isn't doing you any favours for disabled users or the search engines, For the best advice for that check out my post here on DF for accessible web coding to fix it, pay attention to section 1A.

Right now for your main SEO problem you need to sort of your conicalization issue, that being you have 2 different versions of your site, 1 under www. and one under the none www. version.

To fix it create a plain file, save it as .htaccess and upload it to your main root folder, then delete the www. bit press enter if it redirects to the www. bit it is working.

In that file add this ~
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.nowinowskidesign\.com [NC]

PHP:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.nowinowskidesign.com/$1 [R=301,L]
If you get a 500 error let me know.
Hope it helps.
Jaz

Key:
Purple ~ XHTML
Green ~ CSS
Red/PHPcode ~ Mod_Rewrite
 
wow. thanks for all this stuff, what a huge post. I'm going to have to print this out to go through it all. I knew some actionscript before I started on this project but I've been teaching myself the css and html as I go and learning quite a bit in the process I hope.
The image sizes are on a list of stuff that I'm slowly ticking through, so hopefully I'll get to those pretty soon.

thanks again,

Nate
 
Back
Top