Got some comments for you: I do like it overall, but there are some things I'm not so keen on:
- Lose the music, or at least set the default to silent. Music has to be the best way to get visitors leaping for the 'Back' button
- If there's a 'virtual gallery' view for the first one, why not for the second one too? At least, I couldn't find it if there is one ....
- Why the particular layout and placement of images in the virtual gallery? You end up with a huge amount of screen space delivering a few small images - some so small that they're effectively invisible. And why were the ones with a lot of detail but low contrast at the back, whereas ones with not much detail and high contrast at the front?
- Gallery 1? Gallery 2? What are the themes of these galleries? Why would you want to look at one as opposed to the other? It seemed to me like the themes were 'some pictures' and 'some more pictures'. I didn't understand what the collection(s) as a whole were trying to say.
- I'd have liked a caption to appear when I moused over a picture with a bit of info about it; title, date, that sort of thing ...
- ... and when I clicked the picture to view in detail I'd also like to see extra info such as materials, size, and perhaps a brief note from the artist putting the picture into some kind of context; describing her initial thoughts when she started the sketching, where her inspiration came from, what emotions she's hoping to convey, that sort of thing.
- When you hover your mouse over the detailed images, the pointer turns into a hand over the strip where the 'thumbnails' were.
- Hate the close buttons at the top left!
- Some people will moan about the blue text on graphite background when you mouseover the navigation links at the top.
- The biography isn't very, err, biographical - I guessed she loved art from the fact she's got an art website - I'd like to know more about how she chooses her subjects, the people she's met through her art, something that'll help us relate her to the images in her gallery.
- Why the separate Credits and Contact pages - why not just put everything on the Contact page?
- The images used on the Bio, Credits and Contact pages didn't really seem to reflect the rest of the images in the gallery. There are some really interesting comments about life in 21st centrury UK in the galleries, but in contrast the Bio, Credits and Contact pages seem a bit twee.
- Couldn't get the email link to Christine to work at all; the one to you worked but only if I closed Thunderbird first. Otherwise I got an error message 'Thunderbird is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Thunderbird process, or restart your system.'
I'm using FireFox 2 and Thunderbird 1.5.
However - these are just my personal opinions and not everyone will share them; it looks great, and is 1000% better than anything I could do with Flash - still haven't opened 'Flash 8 For Dummies' yet
And I like the art - so the site's achieved it's main goal
