Thread: How does my website look and work for you?

Please check out my website (www.jdavidmurals.com) and give me your opinions on how easy it is to navigate and if you can easily understand who I am and what my service is.

If you were looking to have your home or business painted with just colors, would you choose my business or would you think I only do murals and or faux?

Does my site give any indication that I can do wall repairs: patching, caulking, etc ?

I don't want to limit my business to only murals or faux painting just yet. Eventually I'd like to get that specialized, but as I grow, I need any painting project I can get in order to survive.

Thank you VERY much!

Nice site, John. You do beautiful work.
Yep from this site I would think of you as an artist rather than a painter. I am not sure what the remedy is, as your site name is jdmurals so that is where your focus is naturally directed.
ALso, I think if I was considering a regular painting job and a couple of murals or some bordering or whatever I would suspect your rates might be higher because you are an artist.. that is just a feeling thing, not indicated by your site.
I am not so good at marketing, but others here are, and might have some ideas for you.
good luck.

David,

I dont like the changing backgrounds, nor the purple text on the home page, its hard to read. I know you are intending to give it a FLAIR for your artistic ability, but I would pick one and stick with it.. one of the lighter color ones. While you are narrating your services I would link directly to examples or, do a mouse over link so that they styled picture pops up as an example.

I didnt get into the meta and all of that, as I dont have time right now, but you do some very nice work, and with a lil marketing you should do well with it.

Karen

Hi there
you do great artistic work I must say, But the site is very busy and distracts from the photos that you have placed on it. also your buttons when mouse over are blue voda icon ,, keep it simple and then it will be more dynamic when they see the images of your creations. also I would arrange the photographs in a more structured manner. as the overlapping again distracts from the beauty of the work
I would go for a more elegant classy look rather than a busy eccletic look. thats just my opinion. I wanted to stay on the pages to look but there was too much there and i left.
Keep up the beautiful art work it really is fantastic.
regards
james

I agree with web and romic. I think I would make the site look a bit less busy and mayber fewer images per page so that the pages will load more quickly. You do appear to do ver ynice work and I would be happy to have someone of your caliber do this type of painting for me. However, to be taken more seriously, the website needs to be narrower and load much faster, and overall less busy.

Hi, I think you are great in your job.
The pages are very slow to open, and this make viewers quite tired and want to surf another website.
You can you use a different way to show your job, ex. gallery, or a banner rotator. You can also use the software I had utilized for my web: www.mediterraneotanzania.com.
The software I have used is from amara.
Also if you put the picture in a better order it will look more organized.
I like a one color background, it will make your work looking more impressive.
A last one, instead of using the menu bar ( which is quite common), link your pages using shapes or just text.
Have fun
Alas

Hi,
I understand that you are a mural painter and trompe l'oeil Artist from a quick look at your site: didn't pick up on the more basic work you are prepared to do. I think you should be really, really self critical about the look of your site; after all you are an artist and I think visitors would expect you to be really on top of that. I will only say that it is very busy. From a practical point of view do you know why your pages are so slow to load? It is because you have so many images on your pages and the file sizes are large.Example, your page "faux" has over 2.5 megabytes of images. Find some imaging software that will optimize your image files for the web (I know photoshop is expensive, but I'm sure there is other stuff out there that will do the same job cheaper or for free). Alternatively have thumbnails which you can point to a page as specific project with only 3 or 4 images: it will load more quickly. Navigation needs a look at: your buttons with their rollovers are pretty uninspiring. Personally, I do not like any of bluevoda's navigation buttons. I bought a really elegant little piece of software called buttongadget2 (cost either $20 or $40, I cannot remember) that allows you to create fantastic buttons limited only by your imagination. I have no business connection with them by the way: I just like their software. Also, because your pages are so large you should consider a "return to top" and/or a secondary set of full navigation links at the bottom of the page.
This is meant to be constructive criticism and I hope you will accept it as such. If I had meant to be destructive I would not have spent nearly so much time on this! Regards, James.

Hi , look at pix resizer, is free and is a very good software to resiz
pictures :
http://www.vodahost.com/pix.htm
Alas

http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/index.php
try this also it is a great tool and you can see what you are getting
use it in conjunction with pixresizer

then i think you will get the effect you want.
if you need any help just let me know
i would be happy to do something for you
regards
james

I understand what you do - but there is so much I don't see - like where do you do it? How far will you travel? Is this only for the Milwaukee area?

All of this needs to be addressed - and it needs to be done on your pages as well as in your meta and titles.

I have to agree with everyone else in that your site is very busy. Lovely paintings that show you are an excellent artist, but maybe showing less on a page would give you more. In other words, a person may be inclined to want to look at other pages just to see more paintings. But being bunched up like they are makes the page very difficult to look at and I just wanted to get out of the site.
Lynda
www.thevirtualword.com

hi, one more thing.
Viewers do not like so much the scrolling issue, the best you can do is to try to keep everything within the screen.
Alas