I'm excited that my new website has gone live (www.chameleongardens.co.uk)! Hopefully SEO will be much better, though I'm a bit dismayed to see that today when googling the usual "garden designer gloucestershire" or similar searches, the site seems to have dropped off the radar, except for my Google places listing for Cheltenham. No doubt this is just due to Google having a brief drop in 'trust', which the old site had built up by being around since 2003 (!). Even though the new site has been developed by professionals. I've had to learn a fair bit about the process just to understand what they were doing, and to make sure that I populated the site in the best way.
My main brief for the web designers was to give me a site that gave much more emphasis to the images, as I reckon most busy potential clients don't have time to read through chunks of text. The words are there if people want to read them, but if they just want to look at the pictures, hopefully they will find the buttons that allow them to hide the text either partially or fully.
I've also split large and small garden design up under garden and landscape headings. Although I am aiming more at the larger gardens or higher budgets, I don't want to put off others - apart from anything, I find designing smaller gardens very enjoyable: you see quick results, and can make a huge difference to your client's enjoyment of their home. But there's always the danger of trying to be all things to all people, and not convincing either end of the market. I signed up for Google Analytics a while ago, so will be keeping an eye on the website traffic and trying to interpret behaviour on the site to see if it's working as I want it to.
If anyone gets a chance to have a look, I'd be interested in your feedback!
www.chameleongardens.co.uk
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Replies
Very nice website Rose.
I like the big images and even if people don't read the text it's good for SEO and shows you've put some thought into it. Nice clear layout aswell.
If I'm being picky and you're after some constructive criticism I'd ask your web designer to fade the images in and out a bit smoother as they jar a bit on my browser (Chrome). This should be fairly simple and I think they just need to change a few inputs on the jquery file i.e. one file not every page. But I'm not an expert, I just tinker till it works!
www.greengardendesign.com
Thanks for the feedback Benedict, glad you like it. I know what you mean about the image transition, I'll pass that comment on and see what they can do.
Benedict Green said:
Hey rose
I agree with Bededict, your images could do with smoother scrolling. Don't worry to much about google at this point, it takes a while to register it on their servers. The google bots will sort it out in good time.
Like or loath it, you don't have any social media links. It's a very easy way to help drive traffic to your site.
Other than that i think it's great, very easy to navigate with nice images.
I'm in the middle of redesigning mine @ www.premierlawnsni.co.uk
Although I'm wondering why i started it coming into the summer!
Awesome Rose, well done! You have some great work there and some lovely images to do it justice. Will go back and have another look when I have more time! Really inspiring and I'm in awe at the scale of some of your projects!
Great to have the option to look at all the images or read the text. The only little glitch I encountered was not all of the scroll bars on text went all the way down - so some text was missing (I'm on Safari).
looks great on full hd viewed in google chrome.
Nice to see a different style of site and i really like it. Very well executed too.
I agree about the image fades/slides.
My last little comment is perhaps not something that can easily be changed but images loading is a personal hate of mine to the point that i nearly turn off immediately. Realistically its only about 2 seconds but If there was any way to improve the speed so it doesn;t need to load at all without compromising image quality i would do it.
Thanks Jenny! I have had some very lucky breaks with great commissions, which helps the portfolio!
Really useful feedback about the scrolling when viewing with Safari, thanks.
Jenny Bloom said:
Hi Robbie, thanks for the feedback. The social media is something I think I will add in due course, good point.
Your website looks good already, easy to use, and some impressive lawns! Personally I would want to see more easily where you are located geographically as if I was a potential client I'd be looking for someone reasonably local - I did find it but not on first glance.
I grew up in NI - you have a great climate for gardens! and all this rain will surely be helping the grass to grow at least? It's turning into the wettest drought for decades here!
Robbie Lynn said:
Hi Simon, thanks for your comments, glad you like it!
The time to load images is a tricky one - the site started off quite a bit slower so we had to compress all the images - some were huge originally as they were taken by a professional photographer and very high res. I was sorry to lose the image quality but you're right, no-one likes waiting while a page loads. My web designer persuaded me that faster broadband is the way the internet is going, and doesn't think the current speed should be a problem, but it will be interesting to see what others say over the next few months. I think this is the price you pay if you want to display lots of big images. Maybe Flash would be faster (?) but apparently is a no go for anyone viewing on an iphone or similar.
Simon Smith said:
Just had a quick look at your site Benedict - some really lovely work there, and beautifully executed. I was interested in your graphics - I see you're using sketchup, but what are you using for the planting visualisation?
Rose Lennard said:
Thank you Rose.
For my sketchUp plants I tend to make my own 2D image components if I can't find what I want in the 3D warehouse. This isn't too difficult, just need an image of a complete plant in profile and delete the background in photoshop. Then import the image to sketchUp and turn it into a component, making sure that it 'faces camera'. Shadows can look funny if they 'always face sun', so turn that off, especially with wide based plants, however trees look OK. Also making images slightly transparent can look good, just make sure transparency rendering is set to 'good' rather than 'quick'.
When I export a 2D view I normal do a bit of photoshopping to iron-out any oddities. Border edges can look weird with 2D plants so these can be fudged in photoshop. Looking at some of my older sketchUp images on my website they look a bit clunky now and I think I've got a bit more sophisticated with it lately.
www.greengardendesign.com
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