New website...would like honest review

Alright...I'm good at giving other people advice about marketing and now it's my turn to take it

I'm not a web designer, but I am a control freak and so I've created my own site. I had it connected to my wedding business for the past year and I finally broke free and gave CATZ FACES it's own domain.

www.catzfaces.com

I'm going to be adding more in the future and looking forward to Léa Selley’s web class at Bodyssey (in Calgary) at the end of the month. My gallery will change dramatically, but at least I have some photos there. I made them fairly low resolution on purpose. I have my address on there for a reason too.

Any suggestions/opinions are appreciated

Thanks,

I'm really happy that you decided to give your face painting it's own dedicated site. I visited your old site before just to look and was wondering why they were together.

I like your new site. It is basic and to the point. The only thing I might suggest changing is that on the Testimonials page you put the testimonial in quotes. Right now it just looks like a bunch of reading material, but if you put them in quotations it will draw the eyes to each individual quote.

Hope this helps.

Thanks! It's great to see it from someone else's eyes. I've been so focused on this for a week now and missed that on the testimonials page. I made some changes to make it look a little more segmented.

I guess I struggled with getting 'serious' about my facepainting business for the first year. I'm part Scottish and couldn't justify paying for a 2nd hosting until I was making enough money to support it. I know hosting is cheap, but so am I It feels good to be 'rid' of all the other stuff I was advertising on my website too. I have a lot of interests and am now focusing on just the wedding workshops and face and body art. It's going to take a lot longer to get the wedding website to the way I want it, but it'll be worth it. I've been building it up for over 6 years now and it has an awesome local following. I've held off marketing my face and body art until I knew I could make a go of it and my website was in order. In a couple weeks I'll be going to my first convention and I'll really feel ready after that

Hi Catz, nice site.

My observations are about the galleries. I know you said they will change dramatically, so my suggestion is that you are able to click on each pic to enlarge.

I work off a laptop with a small screen and it's hard to make out what each face looks like.

Good Luck!
Cheryl

I like it, very easy to navigate, and it is bright and cheerful.

Since I am new to the forum, I am not familiar with each person who posts here yet and don't have everyone's personality sorted out yet, if you know what I mean. When I see your avatar, I think "oh yes the Fiona lady". So when I went to your new site, I was hoping to see a larger picture of you as Fiona because to me that's what I remember most about you and I wanted to see more of that. Also, on your billing page you do not mention if there is an extra charge for dressing in character - in fact I think the only place that Fiona is actually mentioned is on the gallery page.

So that would be my suggestion: feature the Fiona character a bit more (I think it is quite unique) and set out the extra fee for it. Just my 2 cents.

I agree w/ the smallish pictures. I work on a netbook & they are hard to see.

FYI, Your Holloween link is broken.

I love the ease of navigating the site. All in all, it looks great!

Looks good overall, but agree that you need to have a link to larger images-especially the belly art.

A few other points. You have some low res images that appear pixelated that she be replaced.

I would also use less type faces. Many times we get carried away, but this actually confuses the eye.

Also, I don't really like to words over your images. It really covers up your work, but that is just me.

Also, dilegently check your links. At least one of the links under facepainting doesn't work. I think "Halloween".

Good job over all!

-Metina

Yea, I believe broken links affect how well your site is ranked in searches. Not 100% on that, maybe someone could confirm/deny.

Nice..... things look great.

Just had questions about the 'drop in rate'. How will clients know the length of time a face takes? You may just want to put a range in there of $10-20.

Just my two cents. BTW, your work is looking great and I'm looking forward to meeting you at Bodyssey too!! Yeah... I'm going!

It's looking good. Really good.
I feel like the format could stand to be reversed on the front page: put the links on the left side of the page & the "Available for" box on the right. My mind naturally ignores the links on the right side of the page because many websites, blogs, etc, shove the advertising links on the right side of the page, so it just doesn't feel intuitive to click there. Is that just me?
Also, the black link bar shown on the home page is just a little different in size than it appears on the other pages. Having it uniform across all pages would be quite nice.
I like the header style you have on half of the pages (like the Contact & Resources pages)... I would love to see that continued with all the pages (it's not on the FAQ or Testimonial pages).

Sorry about the Halloween broken link...not sure how that happened, but it's fixed now. There's so many places to double check it's hard to keep track of which ones are still unchecked.

Hazel, I added Fiona and Shrek on the front page and under bookings I added the cost to come in costume. That was a bit of an oversite

I agree Metina, I totally advocate limited fonts. It's just sometimes individual computers convert the font to something else if they don't have the one I used. I thought 'Arial' was a websafe font and that's all I'd used, but I guess the 'Arial Narrow' isn't. I've changed it to Tahoma which takes up a bit more space than Arial narrow, but not as much as Arial, but still pretty similar.

Jengo, I didn't notice the black link bar was different, so I've now copied and pasted them all to be the same. Thanks for noticing that. I made the header on Testimonials and FAQ different so I could fit more text in a smaller space. I agree though on uniformity. Does that bug anyone else too? It used to be that because we read from left the right, the right side is where we should have the important stuff. But with the changing technologies and practices, we've evolved to avoid it...wow! Thanks for the insight. That's the difference between the printed and the electonic word

I'm going to change the gallery to what many of you suggested with the photos in better resolution and opening up to a bigger box, but that's programming beyond my skill level and I have someone working on it for me, but it'll take some time. I'm going to change a lot of the photos anyway after I come back from Bodyssey at the end of the month. I'll have 'BC' (before convention) and 'AC' (after convention) libraries LOL. Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I really am excited about taking some classes and meeting many of you all.

Be sure to hit 'refresh' if you have a look again. I've made quite a few changes.

Thanks everyone!! I really appreciate your input.

Hi Magna !

Just a few points I saw. For one, I really like the colors, bright, but not too overwhelming. Second, I'd have to agree with all the comments on how to make the gallery better. Third, your "The Artist" and "Contact" links are the same, perhaps you'd think about either combining them or changing them? Maybe for the contact page you could retype the information into the larger box at the bottom, because that's the first place that I start to read, and basically skipped over the box above it with the contact information !

- Isabelle

P.S. $150? I wish I was as great a painter as you so that I could charge that much. I could buy so many supplies with that much..

Thanks Isabelle. Your comment made me realize it's a little unclear what my rates are. The $150 is for a two hour event. $75 an hour is really a minimum for quality facepainting around here. When you're insured, using professional products and maintaining your skills, you should be compensated appropriately.

I like it.