SITE REVIEW: Portfolio website: WhenImNotSleeping.com

Hey All, I put up a new portfolio site today. Its still pretty busted in IE6.

I'd love it if anyone has any feedback. Anything I'm missing for a good portfolio? Stuff thats broken, misspellings etc. Thoughts on the color scheme and layout. Is it too simplistic? Should I add more color/visual interest?


Here's the site
www.whenimnotsleeping.com

Stuff on my todo list:
1. Make it work in IE6 (png hacks etc)
2. Convert to AJAX contact form
3. Add some meta data
4. Printer friendly styles

anything else?

OMG! I can't believe you haven't gotten one review. I think that means your site sucks! No that means it's really good right? Or does it mean that a lot of the viewers aren't at your skill level, so they don't know what to say? Oh I get such a kick out of this. Can I rant just a second? I have seen some of the worst sites ever get numerous reviews. All say "nice" "good work" and a bunch of other crap. And then some of the most modern, efficient, well planned sites, get no review or response. That makes no sense to me.

ANYWAYS! Glad you are back from your nap. I like the site. And my first thought however is, "where's the rest?". I think you went a too minimalist on this one. I really liked the last one. And I personally don't think you should go with the one page design. I just think it's doing your work justice. The layout is clean, but I think you could have expanded it just a little. And the text is a little small for my liking. But I love the color scheme. The imagery is awesome. I would also increase the size of the logo. Just a thought...what if the bg were static?

Excellent job. You have a great design that is very appealing. I really like what you did with your footer at the bottom and how it has the solid white trim around it. It makes it stand out quite a bit.

One thing I noticed which I'm sure you already have considered is that by having all of that work on one page, it takes a little while to load much of the items.

I'm a little split between whether or not I like the empty space directly beneath your header. I kind of like it because it differentiates a bit between your work samples below that and your About divs. But at the same time I think you could add either another column there or something, or perhaps move those divs over to the left slightly more.

All in all I think you've done a great job with this site and it really portrays the excellent work that you are capable of.

hey guys thanks for the replies. I feel like its 99% there but I don't really know what I'm missing. It seems a little too plain to me and I think the solution is to do something more graphic with that upper left logo area. thoughts?

Whats the feeling on the size of the gallery images? And did you notice that you can flip through several images in each project or was that hard to find? I'm kind of leaning toward bigger images and something that makes it obvious that there's a series of images.

Anyway I do want to stick with the "one page" type site for several reasons:
1. I like that I can control the order of viewing my work. Similar to a printed book where you order the projects from page to page.
2. The most important part of the site is my work and a one page site means a viewer doesn't have to "figure out" the nav before seeing the work.
3. With a multipage site I'm always tempted to put more work into the shell and I feel like it runs the risk of overshadowing the work.

However, the one page is creating a load time issue, so I'm going to have to see what I can do about that. I'm worried that all the js is killing the load so I may end up needing to remove the popup contact section.

there is no doubt is your site is very good.
but the site is very dark, on my computer.

I see your point. And I am seeing that this is a growing trend. But with the load issues, seems like you have to make a tough choice. And I think you do need some imagery in that corner. I like the dark design of it however. Great work!

Ok after lots of comments about the "logo" area in the upper left and load time, I've made a few adjustments. Does this solve the balance and focus issues in the upper left?

I think you nailed it. Great work. Can I ask what you did to decrease the load time? Doesn't look like you changed anything visually.

I did get a bit board waiting for the slide shows to load not sure what can be done about it. I don't like the colour but I am colour blind so I do find it hard to see things that are close in colour like dark brown and light brown like you have used.
But I do like the Contact bit clever I like how it is done but you cant scroll down in the window maybe you could add a scroll bar to it but all in all its OK it is only a portfolio so it is not trying to draw in a customer it is showing off your skills and it does do that!

Thanks Zaiah. I'm a lot happier with it (still a lot of little tweaks, but I think thats perpetual on your own site). I did several things for the load time and I don't know that it was any one thing or the combo.

I had several separate js files and combined them all into one js file so there were fewer http requests. I set the Flash galleries to load sequentially down the page instead of all at the same time. And I assume the thing that made the most difference was removing the "alternate gallery" images. I had it set so that users who don't have Flash would see the first image in the gallery (essentially it was loading them twice, once on the page and once in Flash). Right now there isn't any alternate content, but my goal is to put the images back as a list of links and then have flash parse the HTML and load the linked images.

[Zaiah's jaw drops slowly] and in an effort to sound really smart, he says "did you know they had the internet on computers now?" [ he continues to draw hand turkeys, locally the ink from the marker is not permanent ]
You lost me dude. But that's okay. I need to do more studying.

heh sorry. I suppose it doesn't make much sense if you can't see how everything was built in the first place but don't be knocking the hand turkeys. I happen to think we should all draw those from time to time... Anyway I've been treating a new site as a learning experience as well. It was a good chance to brush up on all the new tricks, but IE 6 compatibility is still killing me.

Oh no, 18 validation errors, why so ... I'm sure you can sort them out though ...

Anyway, yes I do like the design, although I'd enjoy it if you were to make the normal <p> text a little lighter, not a lot just maybe to a colour somewhere in between the headings and the current colour.

Something seems a little screwy with the part where the you can switch between images for a specific project, when I hover the first time, and take my mouse off, then it's fine, but after a few times it seems like it doesn't quite know what to do anymore ...

Yeah, further than that ... good job ...

yeah those errors suck. Its getting mad about link url's inside the a tag because they include inline variables. For example: http://www.mydomain.com?ID=4&cat=8 They're valid url's but the validation parser is mad about the extra equals signs. I kind of decided I didn't care about those errors, but any ideas around the issue would be much appreciated.

[edit] - nevermind I read the spec a little closer and it was the unencoded & that was the issue.

Anyway thanks for the feedback.

nice one ...