Hi all, We just redid the layout of our home page and are looking for comments. It looks best with an HTML5 compliant browser. (otherwise no dropshadows for you!) http://www.ianandwendy.com All comments welcomed!
You have some wonderful, amazing content on your site- the photos are amazing. You have a lot to share. Shame about the black background. I would suggest going for something more "warm" to give your viewers a warm experience and not a dark experience. After a lot of trial and error, a lot of toiling and CSS hacking I have recently made some serious changes to my own layout that gives it a very warm feel- although it's not fully optimized for IE yet- which I am working on right now. It's not centered properly. I suggest you could do the something similar. Also with that type of quality content you could make some serious money through Google adsense. As long as the pictures are actually captured by the google search engine and labeled appropriately. This may help you, http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ . Not sure if your content management system/picture album gives top quality SEO for your pictures. You can learn from my friend who is a photographer and makes good money via Google adsense. See the way he publishes some of his pictures- http://www.kriyayoga.com/wallpapers/widescreen_wallpapers.html Anyway good luck, and excellent quality content!
Thanks so much for your kind words! We agree on the black background - but before we knew any better, we chose this design and "vignetted" a bunch of images (that is, the jpg's have fade-to-black edges). We would need to redo a substantial amount of content to undo this decision. We are using adsense all over the website (except for the home page). We have tried as much as possible to provide text-rich descriptions and meta-content for google indexing, and this has paid off with a very high percentage of traffic coming from search engines (and image search). But with a very low CTR typical of image galleries, adsense remains only a portion of our monetization strategy. I looked at your friend's website, and while I'm sure it monetizes well, it's a little too "spammy"/made-for-adsense for us.
I think maybe if you redesigned the logo/banner it could really give it a more advanced look. I honestly like a lot of the black, but to me all of the white/yellow text makes it a little overwhelming - like there is nothing to break it up. But aside from that, I like it...