Critique my lighting design website please

[DavidAhumada]

Hey everyone, I've got my design website back up and running, and I was hoping I could get some advice on what works and what doesn't work on the site. The address is David Ahumada's Lighting Designs. It's a work in progress so what should I be doing to improve? What have I done well? Any advice really would be a ton of help.

 

[Footer]

Lose the show you did in high school. The show looked OK but your other stuff looks better. At least lost the picture with someone sitting in the front row with houselights up.

Is there a reason why you can't click on each picture and get a larger version? You might want to look at something like HighslideJS to make that happen. If you are running on wordpress, there is a great plugin for that. Your images are too small to see what is really going on.

Because you have not worked in nearly 9 months, I would eliminate dates from your resume'. I would also eliminate anything involving the word middle school. I can only deduce that you were paid to do that when you were in HS, it still looks a bit odd. I would also not put your references on your web resume'. Have it on your paper one you send out, but don't give out other people's phone numbers online. I would also elimated "assistant to the lighting designer" and just call it assistant LD. Assistant to gets coffee and picks up lunch and possibly walks the dog.

It could use some cleaning up over all. Your fonts are pretty bland. You could use some color here or there. Your website is the first thing people see that shows your design eye. Make sure it speaks just as highly as your designs onstage. You might also want to consider deviding it up into different sections. One for dance, one for musicals, one for straight theatre.

Also, I went to college/was room mates for a summer with Steve Moore... You should probably use him as a reference instead of all professors.

 

[JChenault]

First off - I am assuming that the purpose of this site is to let prospective employers see the kind of work you do so they will be more likely to want to use you. If that is not what it is about, the rest of this post is probably off target ( I will be critiquing in the role of a producer interested in your work )

First of all, put some more work in your intro photo to your designs. The shot for Edmond ( man and woman - long shot) does not display well. It is not in focus, and it appears to need some color correction. Indeed a lot of your full stage shots seem to be soft focus, and blown out a bit in the highlights. Not good.

What Footer said about seeing a larger version. You are using very large images on the site. Either let me see them, or make them smaller so I don't take up so much bandwidth to see them. IE a 1.5MB image is overkill for the size you are letting me see it at.

The images and resume might be ok - but where are the supporting documents. Give me a warm and fuzzy feeling that you know how to do paperwork. Take one show and give me a beautiful light plot, instrument schedule, cue sheets, magic sheet, design process shots, etc. Make me comfortable that you can communicate with my electricians and get the work done in a quick and professional manner. I would opine that this is the biggest deficiency in your site at this time. Anybody can have pretty pictures - can you create a plot, communicate with the director, etc?

Find me some images that use gobos either on bodies, or on the scenery as scenic elements. I saw one image with shadows that was probably a gobo. Do you know how to use them - I can't tell.

I think you need to edit the number if images. Think carefully about what story you are trying to tell with your site, just as you think about what story you are trying to tell with your lighting design. Give me a link for 'more productions' somewhere, but put your best story out front. I will have about two minutes to look at your site and see if you merit further review. You have made it difficult to do this because you have not edited effectively - so I will probably think ' Eh - just another college student showing all he has ever done'.

In your 'Lighting Design' section you present a bunch of shows that I am not familiar with. I want context. Let me know what kind of show this is, and what kind of venue it is so I can decide if I want to see more about it. IE " 'Anything goes' Musical. Small Proscenium. 250 dimmers. 312 fixtures. " This lets me see if you can handle my kind of space.

Hope this helps.

 

[Anvilx]

Why do you announce that "bellow you will find a link to download copies of my resume" it is totally unnecessary, a more elegant solution would be to simply say "download" or "download my resume" and make it all one link. It sort of like starting a paper with, "I am writing this paper to tell you about xyz..." get to the point.

Another thing is use your CSS. Your style sheet has like 5 lines of code that only set the color of things to #EEEEEE, use it to set things like link styling, I hate links that are styled exactly like all the other text except your cursor changes when other them, it's bad UI.

Here's my tip to you USE WORDPRESS! I can't stress this enough their are all sorts of plugins for everything imaginable. An their are a lot of themes that can help you achieve a topnotch look in no time, though please don't leave the themes 100% stock, it looks lazy.

Here is a little showcase of some sites that run off wordpress:
http://Anvilx.com (Mine - Modified inove theme)
http://vansandtdesigns.com/portfolio (Footer's - Thesis Theme)
MonsteRawr (MrsFooter's - Modified Black Che Grafitti Theme)
TSmithCreative » Theatre (Friend of Mine)

Also install firebug (I think opera already has it built in) and peek under the hood of these site. I urge you to move away from tables and more towards CSS though tables do have their places.

I'll probably have more comments later.

 

[DavidAhumada]

Hey everyone thanks for the advice. I hope to get to work on a lot of this tonight. A few people have mentioned Wordpress, currently I am using Dreamweaver to put it all together, I'd like to keep using DW though I do have a bit of learning to do in regards to the program itself. For one, is there a way to compress the image file so it isn't as large? I'm planning on building it up so you can click on the smaller images and link to a full size image.

Oh, also in regards to using the tables. I've been using a template page I built, so I ended up adding a single cell of a table to keep an editable section, is there a better way to do that?

 

[Anvilx]

Ditch the tables I beg you. Here are a few points I found CSS vs Tables - 13 Reasons Why CSS Is Superior to Tables in Website Design | CHROMATIC. Basically tables should only be used for data.

 

[LXQuito]

David, do you have Photoshop? If so, you can create smaller "thumbnail" images optimized for web viewing, and use those as your hotlinks into the full-size images. This way, too, you can create "teaser" images using a portion of the full-size to entice people to click and view the full-size images.

Conversely, you can use the resize option in Dreamweaver to size down your larger images, but they'll still take longer to load that way than they would as thumbnails.

And you can write CSS pages visually using Dreamweaver. It's quite simple, really.

 

[Footer]

http://vansandtdesigns.com/portfolio (Footer's - Thesis Theme)
MonsteRawr (MrsFooter's - Thesis Theme)
[

Monsterawr.com does run on Thesis. I did a bit of modifying to it but its pretty much stock thesis with a bit of CSS. Vansandtdesigns.com which has a section for my and a section for [MENTION=6409]MrsFooter[/MENTION] is wordpress but it uses a theme that was originally the tequilo.de » Wordpress Theme “Black Che Grafitti” theme. I/ [MENTION=1]dvsDave[/MENTION] modified it pretty heavily to look like it does. When I started my website 4 years ago it was all done in dreamweaver. The move to wordpress was a big one but I am glad I did it. I can get a new show up in a half an hour.

A few of the plugins I use are...
Date Exclusion
Folding Pages Widget
Nextgen Gallery (Really, the best way to do gallerys on wordpress. I could not live without it)
Smart Youtube
Subpage Listing
Wassup
WP-Highslide
WP-Smug Mug

One thing you might also want to look at is squarespace.com It does lock in to their design but you can do pretty amazing things with it and the price is right.

 

[DavidAhumada]

[MENTION=4506]Anvilx[/MENTION]-I'd love to try and use the CSS in Dreamweaver... but I'm not really programing savvy, and it seems to only allow me to edit in code mode? Am I doing something wrong there, is there a way to use design mode and work with CSS?

[MENTION=10994]LXQuito[/MENTION]- Well, I do have Photoshop, but it's Photoshop CS, and when I upgraded my OS from Tiger to Snow Leopard so I could use the newest Vectorworks update...no longer compatible. Can't even get the program to start. So if you know another way I can compress my image files to make thumbnails, that'd be great.

Oh, and CSS visually in Dreamweaver? How do you go about that?

 

[Footer]

Installing WordPress on Your Hosting Account - Search the Go Daddy Help Center

Install wordpress. I know you have put a lot of time into your site, but your shooting yourself in the foot. Hand coding is not the way to go. Nextgen gallery will handle all of your resizing, thumbnails, etc. Find a nice theme and go with it. If you need help, throw an ad up on craigslist. For 100 bucks, someone should be able to bang you out a great theme in an evening. It is a bit of a pain to get wordpress to no look like a blog, but after you do it your set.

 

[Anvilx]

Adobe - Dreamweaver Developer Center : CSS and CSS Tutorial are good places to start. I personally ended up ditching dreamweaver altogether when I developed my site, though keep in mind that I based it off of a preexisting theme. I used firebug to test the changes live to my css and then would plug my changes back in on notepad. It worked great especially considering that it was the first time I had ever done anything with css.

Oh and I think that your issue with dreamweaver is that you created a .css file what you need to do is link that to an .html file. CSS is simply formatting and it can either be in its own file or inline which means it is coded along side the html. I can't remember exactly how to do it but this is what I found on google https://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_best_practices_pt1_04.html scroll to the very bottom.

 

[Anvilx]

Just read what Footer wrote and I second that install wordpress now it will make your life 100 times easier. Think of it like this, no hard coding every time you want to add new pictures.

 

[Pie4Weebl]

I'm gonna throw out the suggestion that you use a site builder called wix.com to build you site. I used it for mine and it was super easy and gave you lots of great options.

As many have said before it would be a good idea to spice up your website. Lighting Designers are supposed to be very visual people so it helps to convey that with your website. A picture of yourself might not be a bad idea either.

Also think about your website more as you trying to sell yourself. Who is your target audience? Are you looking to be an employee of someone and the person understands the technical aspect, or is your audience more a group of people who won't care how many dimmers you used (aka directors).

I also think the links section is pretty pointless. And with your resume I would try to mix up the sources of your references.

But yeah, check out wix.com its super easy, but very powerful. I used it to build my portfolio website.

 

[MarshallPope]

I want to second what Victor said. I used wix.com for my photography website. It is quite powerful, easy, and free if you don't mind a bit of advertisement. IIRC, there is a link to it in my signature. It isn't quite finished, but feel free to give it a look. While I personally prefer hand-coding sites, I appreciate being able to let the software do all the flashy stuff for me.

 

[JBrennan]

I don't have much to add to the other good advice from above but my only question is if that is your home address or a mailing address? If its your home address you may want to get a PO Box or use your work address, or not put it at all. A phone number and email is all you will need to get a job offer and then from there once you know its not a knife wielding clown on the other end of the line, you can give out your home address to receive scripts, contracts, etc.

Thats all I got, hopefully without sounding like a member of the tin foil hat club when it comes to putting personal info online.

 

[jstroming]

Looks good to me!

 

[MNicolai]

Thats all I got, hopefully without sounding like a member of the tin foil hat club when it comes to putting personal info online.

It's a valid point, albeit spammers are the more likely suspects. There are programs written just to crawl websites for email addresses, phone numbers, and other contact info. A lot of people make a living off of just calling up random phone numbers -- if you answer, they immediately hang up, but if you don't, they'll try to pull a name off of your voicemail greeting that they can enter into their website databases so that they can sell your information off to someone else.

Thus, I have a very terse voicemail greeting: "You've reached my phone; leave a detailed message and I'll possibly call you back."