The Easel Life

excellent work,thanks for sharing,fritzm has familiar name sort of looks like mine
but anyway great work
thanks fritz

Congratulations Blake. Your online gallery looks great. I really like your wife’s art. The photography of your work is outstanding. Here are some comments:

1) Your side looks more complete and polished, especially the flash.
2) The knocked out (white) copy on your side does not read well. It appears out of register, not crisp and difficult to read.
3) Kat’s side needs more color and pizazz. Not to distract from her wonderful work, but to highlight and showcase it better.
4) The flash on your side takes a little while to load. Not bad, just a little sluggish. For reference; I’m on a PC, Windows Internet Explorer, and a cable modem.

I hope this feedback is helpful. I wish you and your wife the best in your new joint venture.

Thank you for sharing.

-- My favorite piece is my last one, my best piece is my next one.

Nice site, great photographs.

Worked OK on my Mac!

Slow Flash – especially since this is your “welcome” page – you want it to load FAST! like BAM! you don’t want people to wait on your main page – people don’t like waiting in general, especially when they haven’t seen anything yet – so you might lose some potential clients that way, other than that- it was working fine.

overall the site is carried out pretty well, while your side seemed a bit more organized and polished with the galleries, and the positioning of all the elements – but even then the size of each thumbnail is too large making the entire page larger then the “standard” monitor size – and especially on laptops – you’re forcing people to scroll up and down, left and right, which is another thing that people dont like in general – they like to see everything at once in smaller thumbnails and click on what they are interested in for more details.

enough to think about? ;) great job bringing it all together though – I know from experience how overwhelming a project like this can become. keep it up- you’re on the right track! and good luck with the Easel :)

-- When in doubt - There is no doubt - Go the safer route.

Nice woodwork, but (no offense) a sucky website.

Your home and (woodworking) gallery pages load far too slow. Your ‘About’ page is extremely hard to read. There is no obvious way to get back to main site once inside one of the galleries.

Ditch the Flash and go with HTML.

-- Derek, Bremerton WA --

You don’t half to candy coat it for me Derek.

I’m going to be working on scaling down file size to speed things up. I am also probably going to rework the “art” half like trifern mentioned.

I didn’t realize the text would be so hard to read on some computers. Is it just because it’s white?

I appreciate all the comments, especially the SPECIFIC ones. It really helps. This is the first time I’ve done this and I am still learning what works and what doesn’t.

Keep it coming. Thanks.

-- Check out my new website! http://www.blakeweberwoodworking.com

I can not help you with your website, my son did mine when he was 15, about 6 years ago.

Looks very nice to me. And it all worked.

-- http://www.twinoaksgrowers.com

Hey Blake.. I see you used flash slideshow from the same developer that crated 3d tilt flash gallery product I’ve used for our LJ project galleries. I’m also considering to add same Autoviewer and have an option to switch between them.. 3D or slideshow.. nice nice ;) thumbs up.

But I hope you’re still planning to use LJ actively ha ;)

-- Martin, http://lumberjocks.com | My Facebook: http://profile.to/msojka

Looks way cool to me Blake. Great job! Yep, it’s a little slow, but you ought to see me do woodworking. lol. BTW, your wife’s artwork is awesome!

-- Carl Rast, Pelion, SC

Blake,

Looks good and is easily navigated. However, when I clicked on the link to see “About” your wife all it did was increment the visitor counter at the bottom of the page, I think I added 10 more visitors just this morning until I realized it was counting.

One thing I was confused on is the purpose of the site. You present your works in a good format, but to what end? Is this just a gallery? Are you selling these specific items or are they just examples of what someone can request? What kind of prices are we talking about? What forms or payment are accepted? People want to know these things and if they are left with more questions than when they first came there, they tend not to come back.

I for one do not have pricing on my web site but I am about to add examples and a paragraph that explains the over-all costing scheme I use…for example, this chair cost the customer this much plus shipping. What I do have is the address and phone number of the local gallery who sells my chairs locally and sends a lot of custom orders my way, so I have actually had people call the gallery to order chairs. The number 1 question I get over e-mail is “How much can I expect to pay?”

I suggest you check out some other sites. I can provide you with a directory of nothing but crafters who all built their own websites and sell their products through them. They range to part-time crafters to people who do it for a living and rely on the income exclusively.

Again, looks good and I love the boxes and paintings…keep up the good work, it is a long road but worth it in the end.

-- Rich, WNY, www.nyrockingchairs.com

Hey Blake, do you ever sleep?
I know that is a lot of work putting that together.

It loaded OK for me, a little wait, but once loaded it played fine.
The photo links in your Gallery were dead for me. I guess you know this, but just incase.
When using a sheet/table cloth for a background, iron it first.

You are an impressive man, Sir,
Steve

-- Stevethepeeve -- I'm no rocket surgeon

Blake,

I guess the lesson here is that you have to cater to all sorts of equipment and connection speeds if you want to appeal to the masses. Everything on the site opened fast and worked perfectly for me. Everything was legible and downright beautiful.

Then I read a few of the complaints and remembered that I’m surfing from a superfast university network, and looking at a 24” monitor.

-- Charlie M. "Woodworking - patience = firewood"

Gorgeous. You do very nice work. Lots of fine projects.
Gary

-- Gary, Florida

Blake, Extremely well done – I really like the website, the quality and presentation of the photographs is first class, I wish I could produce the same quality pictures.

Pricing is missing, the trouble with pricing is, if you have it, it can either scare people off or encourage them, the same goes for not displaying the prices, they may think it is out of their price range and they will not even inquire. Me, I am nosy, I like to see how much “my competitors” are charging.

The download speed was good for me (2MB link) – excellent work.

-- Tony - All things are possible, just some things are more difficult than others! - SKYPE: Heron2005 (http://www.poydatjatuolit.fi)

Great work.
Just have time to run through your ww gallery, the small boxes…beautiful boxes. Maybe the flower’s section next.

Thanks for sharing & good luck.

-- masrol, kuala lumpur, MY.

Looks good. Your work is thoughtful and inspiring. The wives work is also very nice.

Kind of a small world. I grew up in Santa Cruz and also graduated from SJSU. I miss the redwood and keep thinking I should do a project out of some, it is pretty darn scarce this side of the Mississippi though.

-- Doug, woodworking in Alabama

Looks KEWL to me dude! Everything loaded fast and accurate on this end. I especially enjoyed Kathy’s ink-drop paintings! Beautiful stuff! You’re gonna have to break down and start making her some exotic frames!

-- Bob Vila would be so proud of you!

Blake,

The site looked great and flash functioned flawlessly with Firefox 3. I had no problem at all reading the white text. I wonder if the different levels of video cards may have something to do with that; I have a high end video card and monitor.

-- Chris

Looks good Bubba ….......

-- Odie, Confucius say, "He who laughs at one's self is BUTT of joke". http://woodstermangotwood.blogspot.com/ (my funny blog)

Blake,

Looks great… FYI, I’m using the new Google Chrome browser, and it all worked fine, loaded quickly, didn’t have any of the issues mentioned earlier about load times.

Nice stuff!

-- Ryno

Blake, seems ok in firefox; the maroon on grey links on your wife’s side are a tad hard to read, as well as your about page, white on black can be difficult if your monitor is old… size your pictures to the size you want to display them .. not sense sending a 1200×900 if you are only going to display a 600×450 .. you have to send 4 times the data; 4 times the download time …

fred

-- Fred, Springfield, Ma

Hi Blake;

Just checked out your website. VERY NICE.

I think two artists in the family is cheating! lol

Your woodworking skills are clearly abundant, as is your commitment to perfection.

I salute you!

Lee

-- by Lee A. Jesberger http://www.prowoodworkingtips.com http://www.ezee-feed.com

I got the flash menu to work.

I’ve still got a lot to tweak and work on.

-- Check out my new website! http://www.blakeweberwoodworking.com