Hey Hubski!
crosleythorne-photography.co.uk
I'm a photographer who has had the same website for the last few years. I pay for the service through square space and bought the URL through 123 Reg. For first I want to change the URL to something more memorable, If you have any suggestions my name is Charlie Crosley-Thorne and I want that in some way to be part of the url. Second is are there any visual changes you would make to it. I want it to be classy for peers but also not too formal for friends and family.
All suggestions are welcome!
http://c2t.photo/ is available. There are also .photos, .photography, .pics and .gallery TLDs to choose from. Sorry I can't provide any better ideas, I'm currently at work. But I thought I'd suggest the new extensions. Will come back later this evening and try to be more helpful.
The most important questions to me would be "What's the purpose of your site — what should it do for you?" and "Who is it for?". Does it show your work to your world? Represent your tradecraft? Bring you new clients? Show off to your peers? Keep friends and family in the loop? Some of these goals have conflicting requirements; some can even be orthogonal to each other. If they are, it might be easier to serve a less important goal with a different tool and to focus your site on the more important one. Doing otherwise will force you to compromise somehow. Jack of all trades, and all that. All that matters is the audience, and for a good chunk of it, your personal site isn't really the best tool for the job. I would instead bring your work to them, and use a place that already has that audience built in. For example, for friends and family who want to be updated continuously and conveniently, going where they already are and having a Facebook page or a Twitter account they can follow easily might make a lot more sense. On the other hand, a client trying to find you is a completely different process - that is a one-off transaction, during which the most important thing is your ability to present yourself and your work, and to have absolute control over that presentation. For this goal, a personal site is perfect. Your current design is functional and clean. What I would consider its biggest sin is that it doesn't put its stars — the photography — into the spotlight enough by limiting itself to these teeny-tiny images. You're selling your work short. Quite a lot of people — possibly even more in your target audience — have high resolution monitors these days. Even retina desktops are coming up. Allow people to make use of them, and put your work forward on its best footing. As an example, this is a site I recently built for a client; the team photos go up to 5260px for browsers that can make use of it. If you need some inspiration, the photography section of hoverstat.es has some wonderful, bold designs. Something of this calibre will not come cheap, though, and might be tricky to do on a Squarespace account. For something a bit more easily achievable, you might like this Squarespace site belonging to a photographer friend of mine which I like very much: antje-mueller.com.