Like so many others, I cloned Andy's site when I first made my site live.

Recently I found some time to get creative and have completely revamped my site and I am ready to have it looked at with some fresh eyes to get some feedback.

If you are so inclined, are bored, want a good laugh, etc... I would love some feedback.

You can hit the site at http://www.jameslegan.com.

Thanks,

Ummmm.... James Legan

A few thoughts.

• I like the background texture.
• I'd strongly suggest you view your site on a smallish monitor, a regular laptop and/or a netbook. The vertical space used by your header and footer will leave very little room for your actual galleries which is probably not what you want. I think they are probably fine for the homepage and perhaps the gallery display, but I think you need a smaller version of the header for gallery pages and perhaps do away with the custom footer entirely on the gallery pages.
• The buttons in the galleries don't feel like they are part of the same design thinking that guides the rest of your customization - e.g. they don't match.
• If you watch your galleries page display, you will notice that some thumbnails always take awhile to show. These are coming from a randomly assigned image from the first gallery in the category (like Holidays, for example). You can fix this by featuring a photo for the gallery thumbnail in every gallery. Then, it will be served up faster and can be cached by the browser to be even faster next time. The way it is now, it's always an extra server roundtrip and can never be cached. IMO, every gallery should have a featured photo to avoid this delay in thumbnail display.
• I'd also suggest picking a featured photo for your Portfolio gallery so nobody sees just the password lock icon.
• Your gallery icons seem a bit odd to me with no borders or shadows on them. I think what's going on is that the background is so 3D, yet the gallery thumbnails are so flat.
• On Firefox, your background starts out in one position, then slides to another position as the page loads. I have no idea why.
• The pink colored underline in your navbar when mouse hovers seems like an out of place color.
• The navbar seems like it should be a color different than white.
• When you click to add a comment, some of the light gray text is hard to read.

Some of my initial impressions. (Some may be a bit nitpicky, but that's me... I obsess over one pixel in my photos, so why not with a site? ;-) )

* I like the background of the site
* I'd suggest making the shadow flush with the left-side of the header (like you've done for the footer). That little extra spot is kinda driving me nuts.
* The navbar doesn't fit the style of the rest of your site. I suggest building your navbar using similar graphic elements so that it blends with the design a bit better. (Part of this is that the navigation links are so.... flat? And your logo is so 3D?)
* You may or may not agree, but I think the slideshow could potentially use a frame to help separate it from the background a bit. If you use the same aspect ratio throughout, you could just add the frame around the slideshow. Given your current design, you could make something quite 3D to pop the slideshow right off the background.
* The smug-footer doesn't blend well with your footer image. I suggest incorporating your own footer and extending the bottom graphic to take over the footer role.
* Your gallery thumbnails do seem rather flat. I suggest using some CSS3 box shadows to easily lift them off the background. (True, IE8 won't see it. Oh well. The alternative is a lot more painful to get good shadows on IE8, but not impossible.)
* No about page? No contact page? I'd suggest adding those to your site in case I wanted to know more about you and/or wanted to contact you.
* Just noticed that the gallery pages aren't showing your footer image. Odd.

Just my two cents worth. And at this time of morning (!!), perhaps not even that... but hopefully it helps some?

John / Kerri,

I have implemented many of your suggestions. If you get a chance, please take another look and let me know what you think.

Still on the todo list:

1) Creating all of the other pages (pricing, contact, bio).
2) Adding border to the slide show.

Kerri,

By design (and still up in the air) is that the footer disappears once you get into an actual album and the header gets smaller to make more room for the photos.

Much improved. I'm having trouble reading the words in your new navbar. I think the dark outline is too much when coupled with the smaller font. It's OK for your logo at the larger size, but not working for the navbar. The lowercase "m" in "Home" is the worst offender. I thought it said "How" or "Howe". Needs to be easier to read. Notice how much easier it is to read with the hover graphic. Also, I saw quite a delay when I first did a mouse-over on it (perhaps loading the hover graphic).

Excellent job making a more compact header (and disappearing footer) when in gallery pages to maximize space for photos.

I like the texture too, but the header is too garish for my taste. Site seems well organized, and hopefully you'll be adding more content soon.