Other than sloooow, what is your opinion?

[FlaWeb]

I just uploaded my first draft of a web site I created for our stained glass business. It is image intensive...so I know it is very slow to load. Other than that, any feedback would be helpfull. I am a professional artist, but not much of a web designer. :D
Here it is: www.RayLeak.com
Thanks
Ray

[Marko Peric]

Actually, I didn't find it took all that long to load, although yes, it is image intensive.
About the site, well, first the good stuff. It's easy to navigate the site, and I like your navigation bar. The fact that the drop down menus open one link at a time looks neat.
The galleries are impressive, with quite a selection, and it's good that each item is clickable and goes to its own page.
As far as style goes, you've got to ditch the italics on the home page. Italics is great for titles on items. It's not good for a page of text. You might want to consider using a different font entirely, or a smaller font size, it looks rather clunky.

As well, there's no need for HOME to be in all caps, nor much else to be in all caps either. Also on the home page, and on many other pages, you have all kinds of empty blank space below your content. That's just a waste of space that you would be advised to get rid of. No need having scrollbars to nowhere. :)

You have a lot of colours going on, and yes, stained glass is colourful. The marble looking banner with the various page titles is too busy, especially with purple lettering. Sometimes less is more.

Also, about titles, your titles are somewhat sparse. Page titles are one of the key things that search engines look at, so having page title "Home" isn't helping you out any there. Something more descriptive would be more helpful.

Okay, I hope this helps you out a little,
Marko

[FlaWeb]

Marko,
Thank you for taking the time to give me some pointers. That is exactly the type of information that I was looking to get. It has taken me a long time to produce the site as I am not a web designer, so I had to learn the software as well as try to do something that I liked. After working on the site for a while it was not easy to see things objectively.
Your comments were very helpful and I will be making some of the changes soon.

Thanks again,
Ray

[YvetteKuhns]

I think the images are very pretty and colorful but they may compete with the images of the stained glass. The heading images look like buttons, and buttons are usually used for links, so that seems confusing. Having a drop shadow for black text makes the text more difficult to read.

The links menu is made of image buttons. I usually use css to simulate buttons to save load time and to make it easier for people to read. If you use buttons, you should include the alt or title attribute for text browsers. Oh, wait. They are on some, but not all of them, or they just didn't show for me. The buttons are a bit too fancy since everything looks busy except the background.

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">
Please include this line in your web pages to prevent that unnecessary toolbar from appearing when we point the mouse at your images using IE6. Paragraphs of text should align to the left.

Your home page should tell what you do or sell. Your about us page should tell more about your business including how long you have been in business or skilled at this job. The contact us page should include your name, address, phone number, email address and business hours or acceptable calling hours. Would you buy from a company if you didn't know where they were located?

I didn't see any payment, privacy or refund policies. There should be copyright info at the bottom of each page. The stained glass are beautiful and I personally love them! It appears that this site is like a catalog site and calls or emails are the way to order. A shopping cart would be more convenient, but this is a good start.

Are you planning to accept PayPal? Do you accept credit cards via telephone? Be sure to make that clear what payments you accept and to where you are willing to ship. Nice items! :)