Website feedback needed please

Discussion in 'Web Development & Web Hosting' started by LukeP, Jan 9, 2011.

  1. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    I am making a website as a personal project of mine and I would like to ask you all for opinions.

    The idea of the website is to provide a gallery of holiday destinations so when people want to go for holiday and want to see some pictures/know more about the destination they can.

    The website is a gallery style site but my plans include some other features in the near future.
    Search doesn't work yet, but I think it will be done by the end of today.

    Generally all navigation is done through the taskbar. Each destination and each country have their own galleries.
    The main gallery which is loaded on entry is a random gallery (not so random with only 5 pictures in database).

    Pictures are random pictures found on the internet, but before the site goes live (on it's own domain with a name) all pictures will be purchased from various photo sites (and some free sites after contacting the authors). I have budgeted some funds for that.

    I'm developing it for Firefox and checking it in other browsers every now and then. Because of that Firefox is the preferred browser to test. Final version will work with all major browsers (FF, IE, Safari, Chrome).

    Website hasn't got the name yet. For developing purposes I call it DestiVue, but the name isn't final.

    I would appreciate any opinions, comments, feedback and feature request I can get from you guys.

    I'm also more than happy to answer any questions here.

    If you were to use this site, what would you like to see in additional information tab (the one on the right hand side of details overlay)?

    Website: http://destivue.theintegrity.co.uk

    Thanks in advance for any input.
     
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure
  2. karan1337

    karan1337 Byte Poster

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    I would like to see a filmstrip of images below the main image, just to get a small preview (thumbnail) of the pictures included in the currently opened gallery. I think it would be nice if i could quickly choose which picture i would like to see first, rather than browsing by clicking the next button. The filmstrip would pop up when the mouse moves downwards and would disappear after sometime.

    That's just my personal suggestion.

    Your website looks clean, nice and tidy. Gives preference to the picture rather than the website, so cheers for your effort in creating it. Repped!
     
    Last edited: Jan 9, 2011
    Certifications: MCP, MCDST, MCTS, Brainbench: XP and Vista [Master]
    WIP: Bachelors:Computer Science
  3. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    Thanks!

    That's a great idea. I'll see what I can do.
     
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure
  4. karan1337

    karan1337 Byte Poster

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    [Above post updated].
     
    Certifications: MCP, MCDST, MCTS, Brainbench: XP and Vista [Master]
    WIP: Bachelors:Computer Science
  5. UKDarkstar
    Honorary Member

    UKDarkstar Terabyte Poster

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    I'd also be pretty careful about copyright on pics. I know JP Getty really get stroppy if you don't have their permission to use pics. It's not always enough to acknowledge a copyright, sometimes they insist you have to ask (and be granted) permission. If in doubt - don't use a pic.
     
    Certifications: BA (Hons), MBCS, CITP, MInstLM, ITIL v3 Fdn, PTLLS, CELTA
    WIP: CMALT (about to submit), DTLLS (on hold until 2012)
  6. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    Oh yeah, no doubt. I will make sure I have rights to publish every picture I use. Spent hours researching different licensing options on different websites. Also contacted numerous photographers for written (email) permission to use their photo on the website.

    I have no intentions of trying to steal any work from photographers and/or photo sites. My gf does photography for a living so it wouldn't be right if I just used someone else's pictures without their permission.
     
    Last edited: Jan 9, 2011
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure
  7. Apoc220

    Apoc220 Byte Poster

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    I like the design, because it is definitely clean. How much info are you planning on posting for the sites? I can't shake the feeling that the "additional info" box is kinda small and will limit how much information you can post to the site. Just a thought: What if you made what is the main page just the one that customers access when they get to your page. Sort of like if you're going to google. Your first page is just straight to the point: "what do you want to view?" but subsequent pages provide an interface that is a little more scalable. Maybe have a similar search function on the top of the pages? Just an idea. The design does look good aesthetically, though. Just think you might be sacrificing scalability. Good luck!
     
    Certifications: MCDST
    WIP: 70-680
  8. gosh1976

    gosh1976 Kilobyte Poster

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    I wish you had more destinations up on the test page! with 3 to 7 inches of snow and ice predicted for tonight I could stare at those pictures for hours dreaming of all the tropical places where I would rather be!!
     
    Certifications: A+, Net+, MCDST, CCENT, MCTS: Win 7 Configuring, CCNA
  9. L1ONE

    L1ONE Bit Poster

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    I'd probably change the background to a lighter grey, or take off the gradient as it looks banded.
     
    Certifications: CompTIA A+, MCDST, MCP
    WIP: N+ maybe.
  10. Modey

    Modey Terabyte Poster

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    It seems a bit broken in firefox. I started to type in Maldives into the box, and it came up with a suggested match, but clicking on the popup suggestion does nothing. Also hitting enter with the search term in the box did nothing. Then when I tried to just browse photos using the arrows at the bottom, it was working but the screen position would jump when it went to each pic, and some of the pics kept repeating sometimes 3 in a row.
     
    Certifications: A+, N+, MCP, MCDST, MCSA 2K3, MCTS, MOS, MTA, MCT, MCITP:EDST7, MCSA W7, Citrix CCA, ITIL Foundation
    WIP: Nada
  11. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    Search doesn't work yet. (Well, it does but clicking on auto-suggestion does nothing) :oops:
    Browsing should work fine. The issue of pictures repeating is based on only 5 pictures in the database and random function in mySQL database. You can even get the same picture 4 times in a row.

    You can click country name in the left bottom corner and it will take you to the gallery of this country (so far only Trinidad and Tobago has 2 pictures, all the others have one each - so not much to browse).

    Screen position jumping is due to <a href="#"> tags on the buttons. Will fix later on tonight (quite easy to fix).

    Thanks for taking the time to check it out.
     
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure
  12. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    Thanks.

    The idea is to show the pictures and not to provide a lot of information about the destination. I'm not really in a position to upload and update information about every country and every travel destination in the world.
    I do want to have pictures of as many destinations as I can. But updating the info would become a pain.

    In the info tab (the whole thing can have additional tabs) I was thinking of putting what language is used in the country and what the currency and currency exchange rates are.
     
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure
  13. JonnyMX

    JonnyMX Petabyte Poster

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    I'm assuming that you are building this as a pet project, so I won't ask about the commercial viability of it. 8)

    I like the site, I think it's a good (interesting) idea and you've approached it in an innovative manner.
    Nice clean layout - but, and I hate myself for saying this, in the real world you will have to think of the revenue for advertising etc which is what may make something like this viable. That means messing up your clean layout with Google ads and other litter.

    One criticism, I'm using ie8 and 1024x768 but on every picture I have to scroll down to get to the navigation bar. It's a pretty fundamental flaw in a site to make users have to scroll to find navigation controls - and if you have to do it on every page it becomes quite tedious. If you don't want to use some kind of auto-resize, you may want to consider putting the nav bar at the top of the picture rather than the bottom.

    Nice start though - I look forward to seeing how it develops.

    :biggrin
     
    Certifications: MCT, MCTS, i-Net+, CIW CI, Prince2, MSP, MCSD
  14. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    Thanks.

    First of all, Google Ads will not make it on this website ever. The way that google ads scan the page content to decide which ad to show will not work with it due to JavaScript + AJAX way of displaying the details.

    But yeah, you're right it is a pet project and I'm not worries about the commercial viability just yet.

    To answer your scrolling problem it's designed to work with 1280x1024. I had to make some sacrifices. For example my work PC works in 1920x1080 and the pictures are small enough as it is. I'm not really keen on supporting 1024x768 really.

    Having said that, I'll see what can be done.

    Thanks for taking the time to check it out.

    edit: Just realised that when the <a href="#"> issue is fixed (see reply to Modey) you will only have to scroll once.
     
    Last edited: Jan 10, 2011
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure
  15. LukeP

    LukeP Gigabyte Poster

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    It's funny that a spammer actually bounced this thread back up as I have just recently picked up that project again (been working on many other things in the meantime).

    The original was written in PHP using CodeIgniter framework but since then I pretty much switched to .NET and ASP.NET MVC.

    The concept remains the same and the new WIP can be seen here:

    Delvee.com - Home

    I'm trying to do 2-3 builds every week, but sometimes changes are not visible in the front-end.
    Currently the site is written in ASP.NET MVC 3 C# and uses Entity Framework, Ninject, SQL Azure and is hosted on Azure Websites. I'm currently working on moving the image store from the filesystem onto the Azure blob storage.

    I swear it wasn't me who bumped this thread. :)
     
    Last edited: Jul 25, 2012
    WIP: Uhmm... not sure

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