www.italianarplease.com

[anna27]

I am an artist and do not know much about computers......any help to improve my flash web site will be appreciated: www.italianartplease.com. The site was designed by a friend of mine. I like it but pictures takes to long to open and I do not think many wiers have the patience to open all the paintings in the gallery. I have recently submitted my site to the Sie review Forum and I received interesting suggestions. I am also looking at adding paypal payment to make it easier for visitors to purchase the artworks. Any suggestions to improve my ranking....will be greatly appreciated.
Mille grazie

[voodooboy]

The biggest issue is navigation. Even as a web designer with over 9 years experience I still had to do a lot of guessing to navigate through your site. You are not going to lose your viewers because of the images, you are going to lose them due to confusion and frustration.
You need to sit down with some people and just look over their shoulder as they go through your site. (These should be people who have not seen your site) Watch how they navigate through the pages. What do they see, what do they miss. For example: I went through the whole gallery not knowing that clicking on the enlarge icon in the image would give me pricing... Then when I figured that out, by accident, I couldn't figure out how to get back.

Some other small things I noticed:
1. There are no meta or description tags on the internal pages. These should be on every page.
2. You should have some relevent content (text) on the splash page to reflect the description and keywords used in the meta tags.
3. There should be some loading transitions between site sections. When I go from one section to the next the screen goes blank while the site loads. There should be something there to let me know something is going on.

Hope this helps. Best of luck.

[mtheory]

Wonderful graphics and colors.

Main navigation easy enough, but in reference to ghstdrgns's comments you may want to add some kind of rollover text remark to the symbol buttons with a description.

Your main navigation seems to flow within the Flash movie from one scene to another. Break apart the sections and place on seperate html pages to make your site more search engine friendly and allow bookmarking of specific pages.

Also add a contact form rather than rely on the end users email client.

Overall, a nice example of how Flash effects can be used effectively without being distracting.

http://mtheoryit.com