I Want to Critique Your Website - Rapid fire website critique

Jared Polin: Jared Polin froknowsphoto.com and I'm calling this is the Squarespace Rapid Fire Website Critiques. That's right. Now we're going to do some rapid fire critique. You may critique your sense [Phonetic] [0:00:18] of peoples websites that are submitted. I'm still doing AdoramaPIX Rapid Fire Critiques, that's totally separate and yes this is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't checked it out you can go to Squarespace.com/fro. You can signup for a 14 day free trial. I personally use Squarespace for my own photo portfolio at jaredpolin.com. simple, easy to use, very affordable when you put those together. That's all I could say so try out the 14 day free trial. If you like it you can use code fro tube at checkout to get 10% off your very first order. So if you signup for a year you're going to get 10% of your full year which brings this thing down to like $84 I believe so anyway that's great. So what am I looking for in a rapid fire website critique? Do you have to have Squarespace in order to get it critiqued by me? No you don't. Its any website. Wherever you have it, I will pick some and critique them. So in order to leave your critiques you can use the submit form that you do for the rapid fire critique for AdoramaPIX rapid Fire Critique. You just use the same form and just put in there that its your website so I believe that this is from Graham Images and Photography. Graham, I believe does use Squarespace so let's just go through. Let's see how rapid this really is. Let's go through his website and tell you what I am thinking organizationally. Now again I'm no web designer. I'm no graphic designer. I'm no HTML person, but I can simply tell you visually what I find appealing and what I like and maybe I'll critique some of the images as well. So let's take a look at this. First things first we got these yeah scroll thing. If you go over to here there's -- yeah that's tough. I didn't really see it over there because it was blending in, but you can scroll through the images this way which is pretty simple to use. There's a good number of them, but I would like to see stronger images there. It doesn't keep cycling. See there are some empty slots. It should reset really quick. I like this image right here. I click on it. I wanted to enlarge. Don't tell I have to click the plus in order to make it enlarge. That sucks. I wondered if there is a way around that. I'm going to have to talk to the Squarespacey people and say if I click on the picture it just should just enlarge. It shouldn't just have to hit the plus. That's just my opinion on that. So we see these images and what I want to know about Graham. I want to know what are you. Are you a wedding photographer, a sports photographer, a music photographer, out and about photographer? So when you're making a website you want to see what your niche is not just -- it doesn't mind you could be all of these things, but what are you focusing on? What type of jobs do you want to get? And I've been told sometimes it maybe have a separate wedding page. If you're just going for weddings then let people see your wedding work. Now I don't care. I like seeing multiple portfolios on people's sites. Now you're not going to have like well maybe you would have naked people followed by weddings because you never know like the tattooed bride. You could have that niche, but let's just go through this. We've got wedding. So we've got all of these different peoples weddings and then we've got I guess moments at the end. I wonder if moments at the end is just a -- is the portfolio for the weddings. Now I like how this cycles through. On my website I don't have it cycled through like this. I have it so that I can cycle through a larger set of images, but again I'm looking at this on a 27-inch monitor my iMac so these are pretty cool. So on images like this, like is the focus the wall or is the focus the couple like I never understood this. You know you go out there and people will take a big picture of people in front of an oak tree so they're like this tiny. They're like an inch of the thing on a 20-inch canvas and you're like is this about the tree or is this about the couple? To me this is just a wall on the parking lot with a really small couple there and blaah. Focusing on the couple because now it just looks like it's a parking lot or shoot, step them away from the wall. Break out a 200 millimeter lens or something. Blow out the background and come in tighter. I'm using my fingers on the screen. Come in tighter like around here and do rule of thirds maybe you've done this, but make it a tighter shot because then I don't see this asphalt. That looks like asphalt. Alright so that's my recommendation on this. Now do I click again are there more arrows? Yeah it goes around. So here we go with weddings. You give all these different peoples choices. I like seeing full weddings. I like seeing people's choices, but I would want at the very top of weddings when I click on that, to take me to the portfolio. Ooh maybe it did, but that's, that okay. Alright this is cool. I love this full screen aspect yes. What I'm talking about? Alright let's see something here. As you drag the screen? Does it change? Yup. It changes. See you how I mean it's responsive which means it changes sizes. I like that. Alright now we're into the portfolio. I didn't realize that earlier. More contrast on this less backlight. Ooh and its rotating by itself. Well thank god you don't have music running because there's nothing I can't stand more on a wedding website then music playing jokimic jokerson that is, alright that's all right. I don't like the lens flare. So something I saw this when I was looking at the site last week. I don't know that I like this getting dress shots personally. I would have cut out all these. She's not even dressed back here. She's on her phone. She's not paying attention to the bride. I like this full screen aspect. I'm going to look into this for my own site because I love the feel of full frame images like this. Boom back to the beginning so I'm assuming that if I click on the sports one, its going to do the same thing. Alright I like that from the stands. That's a good shot too, needs more contrast. Alright, okay you're not a sports photo -- nice Eagles helmets by the way. They're not Eagles, but they look like it. Alright with no disrespect at all you need to have more images than two because I can't judge you. These are good shots, but two photos in the portfolio isn't going to cut it. We need to see more than two photos in there. Well you have all these? Why are these in there? Look this is -- this is spectacular. This is great. This is a great action shot for warming up Southern Maine [Phonetic] [0:06:30]. Alright now this is good alright. Let's cycle through. Very candid moments, I like them, nice action shot. Oh that's fantastic of this -- they're more contrast. Diving back into the play -- sorry the base. Play is going on. This is nice. Alright so this is a nice cross section. You need more of these images in on a -- when I click on sports, I can't just have two images. Sports and, and then that's it. So let's click on music. Let's see how many images we have here? One, two, one two yeah, you got to add more. You got to have like I love the fact that this is more portfolio. I want to see the best of the best at the higher level image areas. So I'm considering this the higher level image are. I didn't know that I needed to click this. I thought that it would just scroll down and I would click on somebody else's event and the stuff would be there so that was a little bit confusing. I love the fact that you can see that, but I wonder if you can somehwoe highlight to click on this area to get this to load so that I know that you know that, I know that that's what we want to see. Alright that's that. Other what's that say out and about. So even how come that? Out and about, when I clicked on out and about didn't lead to the full screen thing. We need to look into that. We need to find that out. So I like this. I like the way that these shots feel so far just perusing across the screen. They look good. Really I like what's going on here. So that layout feels nice. Let's see what do we have for our contact? Photo view, you got an email here that is not clickable that's not good. This needs to be clickable. I mean it doesn't need to be clickable, but on Squarespace you can simply add a form that people fill out and then they send you an email. I mean yes it's not that hard for me to click like this and go and open an email. Not very hard to do that. I like that you have your phone number. I see where you're based in. I would say something like willing to travel, if you're willing to travel I would like an About me page. Where is the About me page? This is Home page which again didn't load full screen. I would like to see a full screen right off the bat and yeah I'm just rambling on here as I get different ideas. I love the way that this looks. I wonder if when you start, when I land on your webpage. I can see this and it would be like oh, sweet that's rotating, and then it would be like top level. I want to see more like the weddings, the best of the best, the sports, the music and the out and about which are very good. I want to see them look like this part of the screen and then I can click down and I can see things more like this with the tiles right so we got that alright. Under the Contact page I would like to see an About page that says who you are. What do you like to do? What types of images you're looking to capture? I don't need to see pricing, but I want to see who you are. I want to see what you like to shoot? What you're known for? Sell me. Sell them on why they should hire you so the Contact page is fine, but I would like to see a thumbnail. I'd like to see a -- what's it called? A box so that they could enter their information as well as their email. I don't mind to having both there because we want people to contact us whether they call. Oh and one thing I personally like to do, I don't like using dashes in between phone number. I like to actually use periods, but that's me. I like to do you know 920.801.810. you know that's what I'm saying. You know this is a pretty good start. There are some tips that I gave you. We don't have to run through it again and really that's what I have to say about that. This is a rapid fire. We're going to call Squarespace Rapid Fire Critique of Websites. Submit them the same way that you do for the Rapid Fire Critiques on Froknowsphoto for AdoramaPIX Rapid Fire Critiques, still going to do those. I just wanted to throw this in there as well and you can check out Squarespace.com/fro. Click the link down below. Its going to take you over to their site where you could signup for a 14 day free trial. No obligation. You don't have to give them any information upfront other than maybe your name. I mean you don't have to give them any money to get your 14 day free trial and if you stop using it, and you stop using it. But if you like it definitely try it out. Use the 10% off code fro tube when you go ahead and checkout and that helps me and it helps you and you save some money and it all works out for the better. Hope you guys liked this. Give me some feedback. Do you like the detail? Do you want it shorter? Do you want it quicker? I won't, I mean now listen a little bit but I think that was a good amount and I rambled on, but let's see how we can do to fix this. So Graham nice job, nice pictures, let's see what we can do with these ideas. Jared Polin froknowsphoto.com, see ya.