Recent shot from the Ouachitas

Here is a shot I got on Saturday November 4, 2006. The colors in the Ouachitas were really good! This was taken at Little Missouri Falls on the Little Missouri River.

I am also in the process of putting up a website. I have not made it available to the general public, but would appreciate any feedback or problems that you see with the site. This is just the starting point and I hope to further refine it. I am using a new piece of software for the gallery called " Web Gallery Pro." Check it out and let me know what you think. The website is:

http://www.tomkennonphotography.com


Thanks,

Tom Kennon

I like it Tom - very easy to navigate. I particularly like the mouse over feature in the gallery, with large thumbnails. I've seen a few sites lately that have thumbnails that are way too small, and are a pain when you're trying to see the file info.

I may want to try this software, since I've been trying to put a website together myself. Thanks for the info - your website's looking great!

Tom, I too took a test drive and I like the way it handles. Simple, straight forward design with nice galleries. Your pricing is short and clear with a description on how to order. Looks good to me, I think your on the right track.

On a side note, I did find one thing interesting. You seem to have a "horizontal" photographic eye. I don't recall seeing a single image presented in a vertical format. Strange how our personal eye and work evolves, I seem to shoot as many (if not more) verticals than I do horizontal images. Just an observation ....

Thanks for the comments Bill and Wayne, I am glad to hear it is working ok. I have a friend with a Mac computer that was having some problems with his browser when accessing the web page. Wayne, you are correct on my horizontal eye. Just last night my wife was looking for a print for a particular spot in our house and she commented she wanted a vertical format shot and there are none on the web page. I have actually shot some so I had to dig a few up for her. I will have to add a few to the page.

Bill, if you want a link to the Web Gallery software, let me know. The price is very reasonable and the software is easy to use.

Thanks for looking.

Tom Kennon

Same deal here Tom - on my Mac I can only see the top part of your galleries - the other pages are complete, but the gallery pages are cut off right below the "Fall Arkansas 2006" text. I can actually use the scroll bar on the right, but can't see anything below...

That's a really lovely gallery, Tom. It's easy to navigate and pretty clear (and has some really great content!). Bill's comment about mouse-over effect is interesting in that (at least for me) it works for IE, but not for Mozilla - the same applies to the nice fade-through effect you have when you click on an image. I'm guessing IE supports a broader range of java than does other browsers. Maybe that's the problem on the macs as well?

Thanks guys, I will send a message to Web Gallery and see if they know what may be causing the problem with certain browsers. Thanks for checking, I will let you know what they say.

Tom Kennon

It looks good to me Tom. I do have a question for you though. On your contact form, how do you keep the spammer robots out? I notice that you can't see the source on that page, is that a counter spam move? I get some spam from a form I have on my site. It drives me nuts. Do you know what type of command hides your source?

Tim Ferrell

Tim, good question, I will have to ask the guys that have developing the web page that question. I would like to know how many hits I will get once I go totally live. I will let you know what they say about the spam issue.

Tom, The site looks great. It's very simple and easy to navigate. The galleries look outstanding. The one small negative that I notice is that there are several different fonts on your pricing page that don't seem to go together well. It's a small graphic design issue, but that page seems out of balance, and we all hope that page is visited often. Good luck.

Thanks Dominic, I will look at the Pricing page and try to use one font. I appreciate the insight.

Tim Buchanan and Tim Ferrell had comments and questions, here is what the web developer told me:

The WebGallery Wizard Pro software is using Internet Explorer specific effects on the rollovers, so Mozilla browsers won't see that effect. They also won't see image transition (fading from one image to the next, etc.)
It shouldn't prohibit any actual functionality, though.
Again, that's all controlled by the WebGallery Wizard software, so there is nothing I can really do to their stuff.

There is really no easy way to protect against spammers. We actually get this question quite a bit. The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to keep your E-mail address completely off the website and force users to use a contact form. That will prevent E-mail harvesters from getting your E-mail address, but it may also turn customers away that would prefer to contact you directly without a contact form.

The 2nd thing you can do is use an AJAX based contact form (like the one that is on your website). The source is hidden so the "spambots" have a harder time filling out the form and submitting it automatically. If the spam starts to get really bad, we can add a "captcha" image to your contact form. A Captcha is one of those weird looking pictures with letters and numbers that I'm sure you've seen on various websites. The user has to successfully type the letters/numbers from the Captcha Image into a form field to successfully submit a form.

I have also contacted support at Web Gallery software to see if there way to resolve the issue that Tim Ernst encountered. Tim, can you tell me what browser you are using when you encounter the problem on the galllery.

Thanks again for all the comments and suggestions, web development is somewhat out of my league.

Tom Kennon

Tom:

I'm on the standard Mac Safari...