Hey people! my wife has just launched this website to try to monetise her painting and art as print on demand products. Really its a partial pivot away from graphic design into POD and art licensing.
(Edit) Link here: https://hillaryholt.com - oh dear.
Any feedback or opinions greatly appreciated!
- Website / UX / code by me (go nuts).- Art by my wife (be nice).
I like the website.
In the language selection section at the bottom flags are images. I’d rather make them emojies: 🇬🇧, 🇪🇸.
Do you already have a plan how to promote the website?
Using flags to represent languages is wrong. Don’t do that. Flags represent countries, not languages.
Yes, I get it, they look pretty in an UI but no, just don’t.
A country can have multiple languages and one language can be an official language in many countries. So, no, don’t.
If something I just said wasn’t quite clear enough, please see: https://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/
Point taken.
I also completely agree. It’s shortcode provided by a wordpress plugin - I’ve removed the flags now (in the dodgiest way possible, with CSS - fastest way possible). Will look into a cleaner solutions later.
Agree. Not using flags at all, or using ISO 639-2 language code instead is a better choice.
BTW, Apple has replaced the multicolored country flag icons used to identify many of its different language input sources/keyboard layouts with monochrome square icons containing letters that indicate the language with version 12.4 of MacOS Monterey in 2022. Not so long ago.
I think the over the fold area is clear. I really like that you have her photo right up there at the beginning of the page, because that will give this website a lot more personality and character.
I would make her photo to work as a link to the About page.
I’m not a fan of those gray font on gray background buttons. Gray button typically means that a feature is disabled and cannot be accessed right now. So using gray in this way is confusing, I thought these buttons are not implemented yet. But the gray on gray was just a design choice, and as one, it’s not a good one.
I also don’t like the UX in regards how basically every clickable element on the page looks and feels different:
- Navigation bar: Text link, with background button showing up on mouse hover.
- First collection area: Big picture, with text under it, grows bigger on mouse hover.
- Second collection area: A bit smaller picture, with text under it, does not change size on mouse hover, instead two new icons (Pintrest and the heart) show up.
I like how you display privacy policy right under the newsletter CTA. But I find it a bit odd how first sentence says “I care” and then the next one is “OUR privacy policy”. You should choose whether you go with “I” or “We” (I would recommend “I”), and stick with that.
The “A message from Hillary.” section at the bottom should have a link to the About page.
The typography on the https://hillaryholt.com/about/ page is a bit rough. The font size is oddly big. I would just use the same font size from the front page’s “A message from Hillary” section.
There are many parts of the website that shows lack of polishing and the care for details - something that I don’t like to see, especially on an artist’s website.
For example, at some parts of the website, you are using the “’” character as the punctuation mark, such as in “I’m Hillary Holt”. But at some other parts, you are using the “'” characters, such as in “Embracing life’s challenges”.
It’s small details like this which can separate an okay website from a good website.
It’s very weird why the website says “We noticed you’re visiting from United States (US).” when I’m from Portugal. I don’t know what is going on in here, but I don’t like it.
And oh, one more thing: The website is painfully slow. It gets 42 points out of 100 from Google’s website performance test. It’s so slow, you will be losing potential customers because of this, so addressing this should probably be your first priority.