Compare photosite templates

[Albolio]

Please help me to choose which website design is better for my travel photocollection. Of course I know what I like, but I need some statistics to choose the template which other people like
1. http://test1.albolio.com
2. http://test2.albolio.com

[LoisWakeman]

2 is a bit easier to read. Blue on black is a poor choice if you care about those with less than perfect vision.

[Rob C]

I would agree with Lois - after all, you seldom come across books printed that way... it is all about ease of use whilst looking reasonably good, even if the viewer has perfect vision.

In fact, not many very extreme stylistic tricks work for long - they end up annoying more than they enchant. Think kinetic art.

Best wishes

Rob C

[Justinr]

To be honest they are both 'just another photosite' templates.

Is there anything else?

[feppe]

Disregarding my strong dislike for Flash - at least the site is faster than most Flash sites -, I also prefer 2. Blue on black is a very poor choice for type, though. It's practically unreadable on many cheaper monitors even with good vision, and especially projectors.

My main complaint is that the home page looks like a gallery page, but when I click on an image it goes to a new page with an entirely different layout. This is inconsistent and confusing. Same with colors: there's orange and blue type, which are only used on the Home and Contacts pages - the palette should be consistent across the site. I'm also not sure what's the point of viewing a single photo by clicking on it, since it doesn't make the photo any bigger. The photos are also quite small in their largest version.

Finally, there appear to be more than a thousand pictures. In case that's how you have planned the site, I would suggest presenting only your very strongest work, instead of putting it all up there. It's better to do the editing yourself rather than expecting your visitors to scour through hundreds and hundreds of photos. Not too many people have time or patience to do that these days. This is unless you're building a stock photo portfolio, of course.

Some excellent work there. I especially like the smoking gentleman in Ghana gallery. I'd link to it but since it's Flash I can't - yet another reason to dislike Flash.

[tom b]

The blue on black text in site 1 fails a standard colour contrast analysis for all but large text which is not the case here (contrast ratio 3.6:1). You should be looking a colour contrast of over 5:1 to be W3C compliant. There are tools available on the web to help you make informed decisions about accessibility.

The Web Accessibility Tools Consortium [WAT-C] provides a collection of free tools to assist both developers and designers in the development and testing of accessible web content. Site is here:

http://www.wat-c.org

Cheers,

[Justinr]

I'd agree with all that Feppe says adding that content within flash cannot be found by search engines and many people simply switch away when they see that annoying little circle timer. In our vainer moments we all like to think that visitors to our site are so desperate to appreciate our work that they'll hang on for ever, this is simply not the case.

Flash is thought cooool by trendy young web designers but a right pain in the backside by just about everyone else. You could always get an HTML editor like MS Expression Web and have a crack at doing your own site. It's not that difficult to do basic pages and galleries and it will be unique rather than relying on other peoples middle of the road ideas. Just a thought.