Critique of my Website

If any of you have two minutes to spare to a fellow P5 contributor and an aspiring sound designer, I would appreciate it if I could get feedback on my new sound design website at

www.oconnorsound.com

Namely,
-Would you hire me as a sound person on your project?
-What other info would you want?
-What works/what doesn't
-Easy to navigate?

Also, a huge thing I am missing is a sound reel, so knowing that I will be adding one in the coming weeks, let me know of any additional feedback. This is greatly appreciated, as I recently graduated from college (and my part time job from the same college) and am looking to push my career as a sound designer. Thanks for your time!

A demo would help, also some quick testimonials with photos. Perhaps a page listing out practical experience, education, and equipment.

You have a nice clean look. I would be careful to not have my font size too large on my main text areas. Large text can tend to look childish, appealing to the wrong target audience.

Color scheme: black is good, it is considered classy and upperclass. The black and whites (photos) help to continue that simple elegance the site portrays.

Perhaps commission a logo, something simple yet memorable. Your full business name over a wave....is ok, but I still like stylized logos.

I wish you the best. Above all things, a passion for excellence will carry you far. A good friend of mine always says: A job well done is the opportunity to do two more. How true that is in our industry.

Thanks for the time to look over the site and provide useful feedback! I will take all of your suggestions into consideration when I make the next update. Practical experience, education, and equipment will all be included on my resume which I will make available on the site as well. And yeah, I wish to get a more simple and stylized logo in the future, but the one I have now will hold down the fort instead of simply having a basic font just larger than everything else. The reason I hold off on a logo is because I'm not a company as of yet, and so I'm really just marketing myself as a sound designer. I suppose I should come up with a company name however... And as far as the testimonials, I am certainly going to take that suggestion and apply it to the next update. Great quote by the way, it's so true!

If anyone else has any comments please feel free to join in on the support, I really appreciate anything anyone has to say.

What are you using as the web design tool? It took a bit too long to load initially. But your SEO (URL's) make no sense. (http://www.oconnorsound.com/OConnorSound.com/Contact.html) for example, doubles up on the domain name which serves no purpose. It can actually work against you. But as an initial design concept it is good. But keep in mind that even these types of things are very subjective. I know it is not easy to build websites just right the first time around, but you might want to consider using some of tools (Wordpress, Drupal or others) that will give you the flexibility to change, edit, add, re-design etc.. very quickly. (Provided your host supports those features) I have been in the internet industry since the weee early days - and have built too many sites... can't stand it anymore. :) But anything that makes the job easy, is preferred.

Vader,
I too despise that URL, it should simply be www.oconnorsound.com. I am using iWeb at the moment and it makes up that crazy name by doing some weird auto-naming I suppose, I've tried to fix it in everyway possible, but iWeb was designed to be "easy" (i.e. not a lot of customizable options, no html, etc.) so I cannot change that to my knowledge.

I might try out wordpress in the near future, although the hitch with them is the inability to post music and videos without adding costs to the monthly bill. Maybe I can get around that by embedding a YouTube or Vimeo reel and simply ignoring my Sound Effect of the week entry.

Take care, and thank you for your time and useful feedback!
Mike

You can set up WordPress on GoDaddy or DreamHost for like $6 a month and upload tons of video and sound.

I have GoDaddy's $15 a month account with unlimited storage and bandwidth and I'm "pushing them" to see how far I can go before they whine at me (over 15 gigs of video uploaded so far).

@Mikesafilmer
Yes vadervideo is right. Your website takes some time to load, usually if I have to wait more than 5 seconds for a site to load I close it and go to the next one. Also the url is something you have to fix to look more professional. Did you tried Rapidweaver for MAC? It's pretty easy and very popular. I too started with iWeb but after it's limitations I bought Rapidweaver.

Check out kuler too it's free. There you can mix up colors that are more pleasant to the eye and you can use it for your web design, brochures, cards...
http://kuler.adobe.com/

I actually like how your site looks and everything. I would hire you. The site loads up fine for me.

....But I would put a list of gear up. Most video oriented people probably wouldn't even know enough about audio gear, but I think it just looks impressive.

One thing, your beard and long hair might be a turnoff to stodgy people, but do you really want to be hired by stodgy people anyway :)

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I think I'll hit up GoDaddy or similiar web builders. I have not tried Rapidweaver yet. The gear list is also something I'm going to add on the next update. I'll try to fix that broken URL issue too.

Initial load time - is a bit slow,maybe, put a link "sound of the week" and have a small window open in a new window to hear the sound, that might speed it up
.
Meta Data - Dude you need meta tags all you have is <title>Statement</title>

You should include at least the following: on every page

<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta name="description" content="Descriptioin goes here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords go here" />

It is good SEO practice to reflect content from text on your page in your description and keywords meta data - Unfortuantely you are using images for textural content, spiders can not read it and that is a major problem for your SEO

I highly recommend you utilize background images in a div for the wave form, and image of you recording, and add the text in an overlay div so it is readable by search engine bots.

Stock SFX

Again utilization of the image text will be problematic

I would suggest you change the wording of this 'My Online Stock Sound Effects Are available HERE' to something like:
My Stock Sound Effects can be downloaded instantly from my
Pond5 SFX Portfolio

I would recommend you use a contact form.

Now I realize you may not have at your disposal a handy html editor, but the image text is a major SEO issue.

The design look is awesome I think, I personally like the large text, it is quite trendy, and now with google webfonts, and others, you can use special fonts on your webpage http://code.google.com/webfonts

Drop me a pvt message if youd like to know more...