Other websites

I've been involved in a game-making competition and have been recently looking at other's personal websites, though not in the capacity that this unit requires.
I was looking to see if they were proficient in modelling or art, rather than their skill of web design and layout. I think this was quite a good approach, and lucky for this unit. This way I started with an unbiased mindset when perusing their site.

http://www.maratsubkhankulov.co.uk/
This was the most recent I looked at, and thought that it was quite good at giving me the information I wanted at the time. I didn't in any way struggle to find the content I was looking for, neither the information about the person responsible for the work.
When viewing the site for the first time, my only thought that I remember towards the site build was the background being dark, and that perhaps putting me off a tiny amount - but it had no real relevance on whether I would contact the person or not.

http://www.scottjonescg.co.uk/
This site I found averagely awkward to use. I wanted to get a general feel for what this person can do, and what they consider to be good work. I had to click on multiple different projects to go through them, and still didn't really get anything other than crude visuals. I had no idea where it was built or how the maps were made.

http://kennethmcmorran.co.uk/
This was the most awkward site to use in checking out work. I remember being really quite irritated with getting from project to project, figuring out where everything is, and then the revelation that the projects are best accessible by using the small arrows on the right. The site was a little too stripped down for me.

Now, I wanted to look at others that are at a student level, as those who are veteran artists would all have great sites, and as much as it would be good to research these to see what's great about them, I think it's more important to look at bad ones, to see what mistakes and issues can be mitigated.

On viewing these, and noting that my site may seem similar to some of the not-so-great ones, I've started to plan editing the pages so that the user lands on the 'blog' portion, and can navigate to my contacts page when they would want to. So, in effect, taking out (or simply not landing on) the showreel. This will mean that when new users are sent to the site they see the most up to date work possible.