Evaluate My Front Page

[Kan Win]

My Front Page

Yours truly,

Win from Kan

[The Vulcan]

My Front Page

Yours truly,

Win from Kan

The adverts spoil it especially the TV which is altogether the wrong colour

[hughden]

Too many banners and words. Just put "Welcome to Kan Win's photos - Thailand as I see it. " and then show your photos.

[BigSnake]

Nice pictures. Love the WaterFall. A tough choice if you have to choose only one for a front page.

[jukapot]

Except for the comments already made, the format of the presentation is great. I think in most pictures your are just too far from the subject, close-ups would have made it more personal and enjoyable and you might have avoided the wide angle lens distortion. Could the presentation been made just as effectively with far fewer pictures. When I clicked on a picture and went to the sub directory with dozens and dozens more pictures I lost interest and was overwhelmed by the excessive number of photos.

Thanks for showing them, I think I'll be getting away from flicker and using Pbase.

[yumidesign]

i thought that blatant advertising was not allowed on Tv........ !

also..... most of the images are very ordinary indeed ! what is your fascination with high key lighting..... its just plainly boring?

Edited June 30, 2009 by yumidesign

[Mark Wolfe]

No, sorry, but this is completely unacceptable.

I used to layout newspaper pages in the Taipei Times -- from the Business section to the Sports section to the Front page, which was my main duty in the latter days of my stay at the paper. I selected the pages (not designed my me, incidentally) for submission to the Society for News Design, which awarded them (and our paper) the "Best-designed newspaper in the world" in its circulation class for 2000.

I was also responsible for training newbies to the paper on house style and the pagination system.

I preface this post with my experience so that you won't think I am just going off half-cocked.

You could argue, not persuasively in my opinion, that Web covers and front pages of newspapers are different. I think the basics of newspaper design are nearly all transferable to the Web.

I don't want to go into too much detail, but the thing is that your "front page," must have few elements and capture the readers' attention. Your effort is cluttered and has no visual entry point. In a sense, think of it as a single photo. Good photos have good composition, regardless of the content.

In essence, you need a lead photo or two that will make people want to continue into your site. You also need some text headline and perhaps subhead(s) that will draw people in.

As it stands now, having the first thing people look at being ads is not acceptable. If possible, the ads should be at the bottom of the page, or at the side. I might suggest a photo strap across the top as well, with your "title" below. Below is a simple strap I made for the top of a non-commercial, unused site.

You don't need to put all that technical information at the top of your page, and you absolutely do not want to have everything in the same size font, in a dry paragraph. Be concise. Break it up.

You also don't want to have a collection of thumbnails. No matter how fantastic your photos may be, seeing a bunch of same-size postage stamps doesn't motivate me to want to look further. Catch my interest as soon as I open the page. Wow me.

Here is a page I designed during the Olympics of 2000. It's a left page, hence the decision to have the action of the lead photo flowing to the opposite page, something you need not worry about. It's low res, but it is only to get a sense of how the building blocks are put together. Your eye should immediately hit the lead photo, then naturally migrate down. Incidentally, the strap at the top of this page was not designed by me.

I am not a Web designer, but I think if you think of the Web "page" as one screen (without scrolling down), and think of what a nicely laid out newspaper or magazine page might look like, you'll be doing well.

[Kan Win]

The adverts spoil it especially the TV which is altogether the wrong colour

Yes 'The Vulcan' you are correct, but could not find a smaller one nor another colour, but the link does work

Thanking you.

Too many banners and words. Just put "Welcome to Kan Win's photos - Thailand as I see it. " and then show your photos.

The banners are there for folks from all over the world that visit me webpage and I am a member on all of them 'Kan Win" hence they are up there.

re: "Too many words" Very ture indeed 'hughden' will take out most of the blah blah

Thanking you.

Except for the comments already made, the format of the presentation is great. I think in most pictures your are just too far from the subject, close-ups would have made it more personal and enjoyable and you might have avoided the wide angle lens distortion. Could the presentation been made just as effectively with far fewer pictures. When I clicked on a picture and went to the sub directory with dozens and dozens more pictures I lost interest and was overwhelmed by the excessive number of photos.

Thanks for showing them, I think I'll be getting away from flicker and using Pbase.

Hi 'jukapot',

Thank you for your C&C, good post.

'When I clicked on a picture and went to the sub directory with dozens and dozens more pictures I lost interest and was overwhelmed by the excessive number of photos.'

If you had read

Also try the Tree View (On Top - Right Hand Side) to see all of my Subdirectory

I have 80 galleries and 2111 images online, hence the above quote. Should anyone wish to visit Phuket, Samui, Kan etc. welcome and they get to which ever place that I have seen in Thailand.

My pages have been viewed a total of 689,049 times as of today.

Thanking you all for your very good 'Critique and Comment'.

Yours truly,

Win in Kan

[bonobo]

I took the time to go through many of your photos, and some of them are really quite good.  But I agree with Mark Wolfe with his point about one photo to catch the eye and draw people in on the front page.  I would pick your favorite photo, then feature that alone on your front page.  Then, you can direct people to your other pages.  I know what photo I would pick, but you should pick the photo which you think best represents your total body of work.

Also, some of your photos are outstanding, some are, to be honest, so-so.  This is to be expected as you have over 2,000 of them be listed.  No one, no matter how good, has every photo being perfect.  Most magazines, I have heard, take over 100 photos for each one published.

If your intent here is to just show a lot of Thailand, then fine.  But if you are trying to show off your work as a photographer, I think I would cut these down and show only the photos which are truly good.  You have enough of them there to still give the site some weight.

Anyway, these are just a couple of random thoughts from an amateur.

[Pooklook]

It looks like you put a lot of work in it up to this point. Just continue the

customization process by using CSS to really change the look and feel

of the basic site pages that Pbase offers. The Pbase forum has a lot of

info and tutorials. If you are like me you only have so much time for work

and photography and all things computer so immersing yourself in code

may get put on the back burner. Thanks for showing us what we Kan do

with pbase. Nice work.