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CodyB.com - Re-Design (feedback appreciated)

C

codycartoon

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 13, 2002
164
1
Hello Everyone,

I just finished up a slight re-design of my personal website last night and I was wondering if I could get some feedback. The design of the site is different in that it does not have any typed text on the entire site, it's all images. The aim of the redesign was to make it more accessible and easier to navigate without sacrificing the style that made it so interesting before (it was listed, among a few others, in a big feature that LA Weekly did about the next generation of artists last fall).

but anyways, I would be interested in your thoughts.

http://codyb.com/

thanks!

-cody
 
Wow, a picture is worth a thousand words, eh?

I really like the lack of text.. there's something to it.. It's nice. :)
 
Wow!

I love it. That's the most original website I've seen in a while, and there's some nice work on there too. (Fellow Holga fan here too :) )

Nicely done!
 
Sorry 56kers

No But there is about 1000 photos on that site (even the links are photos (COME ON MAN)

BTW: Who Hostes it and how big is all the site (WT Pics)

This Is A Great Site!!!
 
Thanks everyone! I appreciate your comments and I'm glad you guys like it.

Lau said:
Wow!

I love it. That's the most original website I've seen in a while, and there's some nice work on there too. (Fellow Holga fan here too :) )

Nicely done!
Click to expand...

I checked out your website as well. I really like your work. especially the Fork Magazine and your Bruce Mau poster. For your magazine you should make it so you can click though the whole thing! I wanted to see more.

agreed, holga for life!

Does anyone here go to school for this stuff? I'm a high school senior right now and I have thought of going to an art school (specifically Art Center in California) but I'm not sure. I think I would rather go to a bigger university and get a well rounded liberal arts education. I'd like to do both but that might me difficult. What do you think?

thanks for looking everyone, I would love to hear some more comments especially if they are more critical.

-cody
 
Your Site

As a student of art, your site is a lovely work of art!

The use of images and lack of words is a creative. The concept of the site is fresh and visually involving.

The only issue I could think of is the scrolling and loading for people with slower connections. Higher resolution screens probably wouldn't have issues displaying, but anything at 800x or 1024 might.

Excellent Job!
 
The concept is a good one like mentioned above. But I'm not a huge fan of the excessive scolling you have to do on each page. In fact i didn't even make it to the bottom of a few of the pages because I got bored. It wasn't that your pics were bad its just there are too many presented at once which actually takes away from the individual pics. Just my 2 cents though. Keep up the good work.
 
codycartoon said:
The design of the site is different in that it does not have any typed text on the entire site, it's all images. The aim of the redesign was to make it more accessible and easier to navigate without sacrificing the style that made it so interesting before
Click to expand...

If your aim is better accessibility and easier navigation, then you've made two major mistakes.
1. Images decrease accessibility and search engine optimization. Plain text is actually easier to read on a screen than text in images.
2. You have "Mystery Meat" navigation, making the user unsure what they are supposed to do/what their options are until they hover or click.

Suppose that I want to see some video pieces in your portfolio. This is what happens in my head...
What am I really supposed to click on? I just see a bunch of images, no links at all. Oh I get it! the top images are menu items... Where is "Portfolio"? "Photoblog"?... no maybe "Visual Work"... Okay... all I get is pictures again... hmmm... I give up... bye.

Alternatively, if someone figures out that the pictures are links, they may want to see all of your videos, yet you have two separate pages for them. Also, no one really cares what kind of camera you use, as long as the final piece looks good.

Overall, to me, it isn't a web site, but instead a bunch of images scattered about a page. Sorry if I am being a bit harsh, I'm sure you spent a lot of time on your site and you are proud of it, which you should be... it's just that as a professional web designer, these types of sites cause me pain.

Oh... nice work by the way ;)
 
codycartoon said:
I checked out your website as well....
Click to expand...

Thanks, for the compliments and the suggestions. :)

As for your comments about going to art school - I'm in the UK so my experience may not be as relevant or helpful as others, but feel free to PM me or send me an email through my site. I spent a couple of years studying drawing and painting, left, worked for a while and am now just coming to the end of a graphic design degree, that is suiting me much better. Feel free to hit me with any questions. :)

As for the comments that your site is hard to navigate - I would say it depends on the field you're wanting to go into. If you want to do quite corporate work, a easy to navigate site might be a priority. In other fields, the originality of your site would be more of an advantage. It's up to you. I think the usability of an artistic site is very different to others - for instance I'd be less inclined to bother with alt tags on images on my portfolio site - the whole point is the image, so describing it to someone who uses a text based browser isn't that helpful. For you to add any text to yours would completely destroy the point and impact of the site (in my opinion).

For the record, I understood the buttons at the top straight away, and found it simple to navigate.
 
I like it

It's true - your site is hard to navigate. However, I'd be tempted to say that you shouldn't change it. I don't think that it matters that your site is slightly confounding - it makes it different. I actually clicked around your site for a while because it was interesting, especially the photo blog.

I like it. It's creative and different. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like you want to be designing websites for office stores (or something equally boring), so I don't think it matters that you're not necessarily appealing to the typical design audience. Creativity shines through this unconventional site, and I think that's what you're going for at the moment.
 
i like it

As a visual communications student and freelance graphic/web designer I thought I'd throw my 2¢ in since you're looking for feedback and I know how much the quality of feedback you receive can impact a project. So here goes my best...

I admit I'm really torn on what to think about your site. It breaks a lot (almost all of them) of conventions on web design. Like mnkeybsness mentioned the "mystery meat" navigation is normally a big no-no. It leaves a lot of visitors confused, and they are more prone to leave your site due to frustration. For me it worked. The quality of your graphics intrigued me, and I poked around just to explore. It was really fun browsing your site not knowing what was going to come up next.

I think before you do any radical changes you need to consider "who is the audience?" If your audience is my mom, or a stereotypical businessman you might have a big problem. However gauging from the reaction here if you audience is more creative types it might work. There's something to be said for the heavy graphics style (you might want to add some ALT text for search engines to be able to index you) and I think your implementation of it is excellent.

So in the end I would think really hard about who your audience is, and let that answer help you decide whether to pull it back a step, or be ultra-artsy and keep it like so.

Hope that helps!
 
Coolnat2004 said:
I don't think anyone but Linus Torvalds uses Lynx..
Click to expand...

Linux system admins unite to condem this foolish man... cool site though...

And lo' though you may have a nice GUI when ye work oneth thine Mac, in Linux the Lord looked upon KDE and GNOME and said unto the faithful "you're kidding me, right? that's not a GUI! Let ye go forward and type things on the command line, it's quicker and lynx is dead handy". And they looked upon lynx, and they saw that it was gooooooood
 
Keep it as is. I, like several reader mentioned, stuck around and explorered a while. That is the point of a web site to it's intended audience, to keep'em coming. Great job!
 
Nice! I like it - I've never seen a site with only images before.

Why, I don't exactly know, but I especially liked the contact page.
 
mnkeybsness said:
If your aim is better accessibility and easier navigation, then you've made two major mistakes.
1. Images decrease accessibility and search engine optimization. Plain text is actually easier to read on a screen than text in images.
2. You have "Mystery Meat" navigation, making the user unsure what they are supposed to do/what their options are until they hover or click.
Click to expand...

I agree with mnkeybusiness. With the mystery meat navigation the top bar isn't too bad, at least when you mouse over the images change. However there are links at the bottom of the front page I didn't even realise you could click on because they offer no feedback.

Also on the about me page, only one of the photos is a link, which is hard to find unless you check every single picture.

Categorising your movies by the camera you took them with is also a bit odd. If I want to find a particular film I have to know which camera you used? It's also not possible to get to your demoreel through that page that I can see (only from the homepage from the non-obvious link).

It depends on your audience I guess, but if you are trying to drum up business or interest through your site, some of the pages don't help. I can't pick out any real information about you from it. I know from your about you page that you have been on holiday and used to be a baby. A little text never hurt anyone.

Also, google is not going to have any fun trying to work out what your pages are all about.

It's a cool look, I just don't think it's very practical.
 
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