Web portfolio design 101

[matgb]

I bang on about usability, search optimisation and accessibility every so often in site designs, but given my strictly amateur status I still quiver at some of the godawful sites there are out there. I agree completely with this article though - How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web:

In the thirteen years I’ve been on the web, twelve of which I’ve spent doing professional web site design, and the last two of which have sent me to hundreds of artists’ web sites, I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that the thing artists want most when placing their art on the web is for it not to be seen.

There are millions upon millions of bad sites on the web, but artists really work at it.

As an example, I think that jonhodgson's portfolio site is actually quite good, but even that breaks a few basic pointers; the use of a frame redirect from the domain name (http://www.jonhodgson.net/) to the actual location of the content (http://troldeskau.net/jonhodgson.net/index.htm and sub pages) means that your avarage 'net user isn't able to specifically link to the image page itself; not so useful for a potential commission to show a specific example to colleagues, etc. But compared to some of the awful designs out there (including some for my favoured artists) it scores well; brief bio, clear contact details, easy navigation, etc.

The more I trawl around,the more horrors of design I see, I'm always tempted to share them but, well... OTOH, not to my taste at all, and breaks a few UI rules, but isn't this a simply gorgeous myspace layout^[1]?

ETA: [1] there's apparently an embedded music file on that profile, hadn't noticed as embedded music on Myspace doesn't play if you've got Flashblock running.

Comments

[eccles.livejournal.com]

Argh, embeded music!!!!!! Well, at least it only had ONE embeded music track, I've seen some Myspace monstrosities with half a dozen tracks all wanting to play at once??

[raggedhalo.livejournal.com]

Good myspace layout, annoying misuse of their instead of they're. So you win some, you lose some...

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

You'll find xhan104 doing lj layouts too.

[fearmeforiampink]

Still not a fan, even of that one, though I suspect that may be Myspace not working with Opera. Seems slightly better in Camino, but I still find there to be too much space in it, and it still has the myspace thing that really annoys me - pictures that move with you as you scroll down.

Suggestions gratefully received

[davethetroll.livejournal.com]

Although I didn't design the look of Jon's current site, I do maintain it am responsible for the technology behind it.

Given that I have access to hosting that it either free (I originally used my NTL world space) or paid for elsewhere (troldeskau.net is paid for because it needed a significant amount of space to host the music), how would you suggest I go about fixing the issues with the frame hosting?

troldeskau.net is hosted by re-invent.com
jonhodgson.net uses the web framing options from 123-reg.co.uk

The budget for doing this is in the order of zero (123 charge a few quid every year or two).

I'm technically competent, but know little about how to go about pointing domain names to subfolders of other hosted sites without use of third party providers.