View Full Version : Suggestions on my site please
Any feedback or suggestions would be kindly appreciated.
Deane Johnson
3-Apr-2008, 06:52
Excellent layout of the site. Straight to the point of displaying fine photographs without a lot of distractions. It goes without saying, the photographs represent a fine photographic eye and a deep understanding of working with B&W materials.
The one negative is the slowness of the site. When I tried it, it takes a lot of patience to wait for things to be loaded. Faster server, maybe?
My notebook's resolution is only 1280x800 so I don't see the bottom line of links without scrolling. I would swap the links with the javascript warning to fix that. Can you hide the javascript warning with a javascript so it only gets shown when javascript is unavailable?
Hi, Ken.
The work is wonderful, but who can wait that long to see it?
My former web designer preached to me that speed is everything for keeping the attention of anyone who accesses my site. I tend to agree. If you cant grab their attention in the first second or so, they leave.
In my case, I'm after commercial clients who don't have time to explore a slow site. They have to make decisions right now or go on to the next possible source. Everything has to jump on the screen.
Your clients may not be that time driven, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Check with your designer/host about what faster system to build the site in (I'm not technical enough to know) and consider reworking it that way.
My compliments on the beauty of the work.
Tim
Ron Marshall
3-Apr-2008, 07:55
The layout is great, wonderful content.
I have visited your site in the past; the images are loading slower than previously.
Wow - Thanks for the tips about speed. I had no idea. My hosting provider is PowWeb. Are there better/faster providers out there ? My guess is that when PowWeb got acquired last year, someone decided they could make the company more..."profitable".
sparq:
"I don't see the bottom line of links without scrolling".
I can make the taller images smaller, so that the arrows are always visible. Thanks !
"I would swap the links with the javascript warning to fix that".
Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. Could you state that again ?
"Can you hide the javascript warning with a javascript so it only gets shown when javascript is unavailable ?"
Probably. I'm a bit of a novice with Javascript, so I'll see what can be done. Excellent idea.
Daniel Grenier
3-Apr-2008, 08:42
Same problem with loading, Ken. Painfully slow.
The only other suggestion I'd make would be to isolate your color work from your B&Ws. I just find your B&W work far, far superior and the color images where distracting from the wonderful mood conveyed by your B&W work. Otherwise, great site and you have a hell of a good eye.
Ken,
If I remember right from what my former designer told me, it's less the host than the program in which it is built.
Again, I'm no technology geek, so check with a designer you trust.
I'm sure the host has something to do with it, but she hammered on me about which programs to avoid because they tended to bog down the whole process for the viewer.
You may have to go through more than one designer before you find the format you want. I'm on my third and am finally very pleased with the honesty and communication. She even knows how to translate computer speak into English so I can understand what I need to know about. (Or maybe the earlier ones just wanted to hide behind the language of Geek to try and hijack my domain name.)
By the way. If you want to be sure who actually owns your domain (not just who services it), check it out at www.whois.com.
Good luck.
Tim
steve barry
3-Apr-2008, 08:54
Hi Ken - cool site. i agree with the suggestions above. speed is killing you.
i use www.godaddy.com for hosting my site. they have many different options and range from as little as 5.00 a month - i pay 15.00 a month for my plan. no contracts, can cancel or upgrade/downgrade at any time.
use crapcleaner http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ to clear your history so you can see how fast things are loading for first time viewers to your site. not a bad thing to run on a regular basis anyhow - i do it daily. its free.
you can implement something like statcounter http://www.statcounter.com/ to keep track of traffic. this will help you see how long people are staying, what they look at, how long they look at what, where they come from, what OS people are using, what screen sizes they have, where they leave to, etc. and its free.
i would isolate color from b/w as well.
when im making a site, or redoing mine, i just check it on all different types of screen sizes to make sure the photos fit, and its not an annoying amount of scrolling for the smaller screens. check it on an iphone too ya know. lots of small portable screens these days. check it on all the major browser/OS too....explorer/firefox/safari. microsoft/mac/linux. you will be surprised what things look like on a browser/OS you didn't design it on. i was anyhow.
and, why the java script? i didn't see anything that couldn't be straight html? simpler easier and more browser compatible.
hope some of this helps....i'm pretty new at web design...so i'm learning as i go too.
steve
David Roossien
3-Apr-2008, 09:31
Hi Ken,
I cleared my cache and then loaded your site and measured:
Time to load opening page = 1.6 sec with 147 KB transferred
Time to load Landscape page = 6.9 sec with 2.61 MB transferred.
by using Firebug in Firefox
I don't consider this to be particularly slow, but that is because I am using a very fast internet connection. Your server is transferring at a high rate, so complaints about speed are probably due to a user's slow internet connection.
To accommodate users with slow internet connections you should avoid transferring large amounts of data on a single page. For example, you should try to reduce the amount of data transferred on the Landscape thumbnail page. For some people 2.6 MB is a lot to transfer to load one page. You might try splitting your thumbnails onto separate pages.
Frank Petronio
3-Apr-2008, 09:34
It's the design and code that is slow, not the server
David Roossien
3-Apr-2008, 09:42
"why the java script? i didn't see anything that couldn't be straight html? simpler easier and more browser compatible. "
Ken is using Javascript to provide dimming and a few other style features to the site. Practically all commercial sites use VB or Javascript, so most people have it enabled these days. You might not even bother telling people that you are using it. Another way to deal with that issue is to sense whether or not a user's browser supports it and pop up a window with a warning if they don't have it enabled.
Or, don't bother with the warning at all. Most people don't even know what it is.... why bother telling them about it....
I am the author of the code. :rolleyes:
I currently use Javascript because I have written logic to build almost all the pages on-the-fly. All I need to do is number my images, and place them in the right directories. I arrived at this approach, after coding and maintaining each page separately, which became tedious.
Thanks for the tip about the color images. Point taken.
I have never seen any performance problems, because my internet connections at home and work are quite fast. I have tried a variety of browsers, and found no compatibility issues, since my Javascript is rather... elementary.
Thanks again !
Ken,
Good things first - I like the layout. Nice, easy on the eyes and unobtrusive.
But... why JavaScript? Having looked at your code, it seems to be the biggest single factor in the site being so slow. (Yes, I too have seen the previous version of your site, and this one is MUCH slower.)
Normally, browsers interpret pages in a linear fashion - they load anything within the head section first (meta data, scripts, stylesheets), then they load the body portion, render what they find there and only then apply the scripts and stylesheets.
What happens when you use JavaScript to render the pages in this manner is that the browser first renders everything as described only to be forced to re-load and re-render everything, this time with new content. JavaScript is interpreted language and browsers are not very efficient at interpreting it. They are much better at rendering tags and displaying graphic information.
Another slowdown, although not as significant but still worth mentioning, especially in this sort of layout is the use of tables for layout. For the same reasons as described above, the browser has to wait for the entire table to load before it can render it. Contrast this with a number of div tags that have no other ballast in the form of attributes, rows, columns and cells and which get positioned and styled through the use of CSS after they have already been rendered.
Finally, your thumbnails are gorgeous, but... they are big and there are many of them on each gallery page. They also look to be of good quality, which means low jpg compression, which by extension means higher byte size...
OK, now for the suggestions:
1. JavaScript - why use it at all? It is slow, it is cumbersome, it is inaccessible (http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php) and when it breaks for whatever reason, so do your galleries. The major, but not the only, reasons it can and often does break are: corporate security policies and browser issues (either a crash or simply wrong settings).
If you want to render pages on the fly, you'd be much better off using server-side language such as PHP.
2. Design - tables are much slower and more cumbersome than proper, standards compliant markup, especially since you are already using XHTML rather than HTML. You could easily save 40-50% of your code by separating style, structure and behaviour through the use of PHP, semantic markup and external CSS stylesheets. That could translate into even greater responsiveness since you'd be reusing portions of the code (stylesheets) throughout the site.
3. Image size and compression - it is all very subjective, but you should strike the right balance between quality, size and speed. If I were you, I would reduce your thumbnails by about 25% or even 50% and apply more aggressive jpeg compression to them coupled with careful unsharp masking to hide the artifacts. It is the main image where quality and size really count and they load individually anyway.
That's all. Not much, really, it just sounds more complicated than it really is. :)
Capocheny
3-Apr-2008, 10:57
Ken,
Very nice images on the site... I'd have to agree with the Daniel and Steve about separating out the color from the B&W images.
No problems with download speed here either... :)
Cheers
dsphotog
3-Apr-2008, 11:34
Loaded fast for me.(Comcast cable modem)
Super quality!
I also like the tech notes.
My only criticism, you have shown 5 portraits shot in the same exact spot.
Happy shooting!
David Silva
www.davidsilvaphoto.com
David Roossien
3-Apr-2008, 11:53
I don't think Ken's thumbnails are too large. The average file size is about 35kb...reasonably sized for the image dimensions. The problem on the Landscape page is that there are 69 of them! That's 69 x 35kB = 2.5 MB of information on one page.
I don't think Ken's thumbnails are too large. The average file size is about 35kb...reasonably sized for the image dimensions. The problem on the Landscape page is that there are 69 of them! That's 69 x 35kB = 2.5 MB of information on one page.
35 KB is actually HUGE for a thumbnail! This is exactly what I am talking about. The one I looked at was actually 40 KB, but when I tried to Save it For Web in Photoshop, it clocked in at about 7.5 KB for the Quality of 60 (high) and at about 5 KB at the quality of 40. That's between five and seven times the savings right there.
At the lower of these two settings, which is still pretty good for the Web, it would be 69 x 5 KB = 345 KB.
And then there is a mouseover image for each of the thumbnails, which effectively doubles all the above math.
David Roossien
3-Apr-2008, 12:10
Marko, 35 kB Note the "k"
David, I just noted and fixed as you wrote that... :)
David E. Rose
3-Apr-2008, 12:25
Ken,
You are a great photographer! Please publish a book of your work so that I can see these images on paper.
You are most kind. I hope to do that some day... Don't we all !
It seems that there are 4 permutations of monitor/connection-speed out there. At one extreme, some have large monitors and fast connections. At the other, people have slow connections and small monitors... so how to please everyone, and show good-quality images ?
On a small monitor, my thumbnails are almost large enough to be real images. On a large monitor, they are rather small in size. The same is true for the images themselves.
Is it best to have 3 versions of the site: small, medium, and large ?
Ken, it depends on your intended audience. I am looking at your site on a 20" iMac - 1680 x 1050 - which is not too large but still larger than average and I still see them as pretty large.
If you intend your site to be viewed by the average audience with average setup, I'd play it safe and size it for one the two most common screen resolutions out there - 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 1024, just don't forget to account for the "browser silver".
As for the other question, I believe it is best to have the site that conforms to the platform and settings it is being viewed on, rather than attempt the other way around.
Ken,
Im a newbie here and of couse this is all opinion , so take it ith a grain of salt. I'm not a fan of the grey back ground, especialy for b&w photos. I like white. I think the images pop more. Other than that the images are great and I did not have a longtime with down load.
Clay
bob carnie
3-Apr-2008, 14:25
Ken
I agree with Clay regarding the background , though it is dark brown on my screen which really flattens the images,
as well mixing the colour and black and white images together for me is problematic.
I did not find the site slow moving about , nice and clean looking
Ken,
Im a newbie here and of couse this is all opinion , so take it ith a grain of salt. I'm not a fan of the grey back ground, especialy for b&w photos. I like white. I think the images pop more. Other than that the images are great and I did not have a longtime with down load.
Clay
Nathan Potter
3-Apr-2008, 14:48
Ken, all images load in about 1 sec. on my HP notebook using Time/Warner cable connection in Austin TX. Very nice images - do I see a portrait of one Richard Ritter within?
Nate Potter
I don't know which web browsers you use, but Internet Explorer 6 and 7 are notoriously slow. So is the current version of Firefox. The new (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html) Firefox, which is still in beta test, is much faster. The currently available version is much more stable. On the Mac, Safari and OmniWeb are both based on the WebKit rendering engine, and are very fast. Now that Apple has ported Safari to Windows, it is available there also, although I'm not sure it's ready for prime time yet. Apple may be pushing it out early, to better enable their iPhone business.
Bob:
If the page background looks brown, then your monitor may be off. The background color is #292929, and the inner region on the thumbnail pages, is #343434. Both are dark grey, where Red, Green, and Blue all match.
Nathan:
Yes, that's Richard (http://www.kenleegallery.com/html/portraits/index.html?32), taking a phone call. That was the first photo I took with my 5x7 Eastman Kodak No. 2. He had just restored it. I picked it up at his place, and couldn't wait to use it. He was kind enough to oblige. Fujinon 300 A.
Jerzy Pawlowski
3-Apr-2008, 17:15
I know your earlier version of the site, I would not notice that the new one is slower if no comments above. If there is a difference it is very small, but I have very fast connection and large screen (1920x1200).
Photos are great, however I would separate B&W and color. Background appears neutral on my monitor. I like your technical section as well.
Ben Chase
3-Apr-2008, 19:23
It loads fast on my DS3 connection at work :)
One thing you may consider is to maybe reduce the number of thumbnails on an individual page.
Brian Ellis
4-Apr-2008, 06:41
I thought the speed was fine. Just a tad slower than some but not bad enough for me to get impatient.
I really liked your architectural photography in the landscape section (though the photograph that knocked my socks off was a landscape, the waterfall and tree branches). I'm also curious how you achieved the effect with the photograph of the trees in the fifth row down, photograph on the far right side of the row, in the landscape section - if you care to share that. And FWIW, I didn't care for the gas station photograph in the far left of the same row - looked too "Photoshoppy" for my tastes and I see that type of thing all the time from people new to Photoshop, whereas most of your work shows a very tasteful use of Photoshap and an excellent eye. In other words, I thought it detracted from the rest of your work. I don't know enough about building a site to comment on the technology but for me it was a terrific combination of excellent photography and an excellent site.
Brian -
Thanks ! As to the photo you mention, if it's this one (http://www.kenleegallery.com/html/landscapes/index.html?15), then it's just some of the "artistic" filters available in Photoshop.
I don't make notes, so my guess is that it was made with the "watercolor" filter, applied as a layer. I may have made a blurred version of the original layer, and applied a lighten mode, too.
Ken,
I think your site is well-designed, and your images extraordinary.
But I too have some problem with how fast some of this opens. Course, I never know if the reason is the web site or my cable modem connection.
But your work is really first rate, and thanks for sharing.
Sandy
Brian Ellis
4-Apr-2008, 20:42
Brian -
Thanks ! As to the photo you mention, if it's this one (http://www.kenleegallery.com/html/landscapes/index.html?15), then it's just some of the "artistic" filters available in Photoshop.
I don't make notes, so my guess is that it was made with the "watercolor" filter, applied as a layer. I may have made a blurred version of the original layer, and applied a lighten mode, too.
Yes, that's the one. Thanks, I'll have to play around with that kind of thing.
One of the things that I especially like about this site is the large thumbnails. I am really tired of sites that have thumbnails that are best viewed with a magnifying glass.
The downside is that it can create loading problems, especially for pages that have a lot of thumbnails. As someone who has a high speed connection, I don't find this to be a problem for this site when I use my main computer. However, these days a lot of people who have high speed connections also have computers in various rooms, and as often as not use wireless. When I go to the site on a wireless computer, the loading of pages that have a lot of thumbnails is definitely slow. That said, it doesn't particularly bother me, because the images start appearing immediately. It isn't like I'm waiting for ten seconds for something to show up on the screen.
However, I think that the number of thumbnails on a page is a problem for a different reason. On some pages, such as the flower page, there are so many images that the page looks like wallpaper. I had to make an effort to focus on individual images. If this were my site, I would either cut down on the number of images, or break up a given category into two or more pages.
Like a few others, I think that the background colour detracts from the images. I had a look at the .pdf from the View Camera article, where the images are printed on a white background. To my eye, this works a lot better.
I like the Techniques page a lot. It has really grown over time, which is a great thing, but maybe it has reached a point where the content needs to be split up into two or more pages.
One thing that I've been paying attention to lately on photographer sites is what the photographer says about technique. Some say nothing, some say a bit and others go into considerable detail. To me, it raises an interesting question. Who does the photographer want to communicate with? Potential clients or other photographers? Is it a good idea to try to do both? Does a lot of discussion about technique impress potential clients or distract them? Is it possible that it actually turns them off, leaving the impression that the photographer is principally a geek. Just some questions to ponder.
As for what I think of the photos, I'm a fan, and have been for some time.
Ken Lee
22-Apr-2008, 10:09
Thank you for your insights, which I will act upon, and thank you for your appreciation.
On my Techniques (http://www.kenleegallery.com/html/tech/tech.html) page, I merely try to share as much as I can, as openly as possible, with other photographers - as is done on this site, where I have learned enormously. I guess it does get a bit...geeky :rolleyes:
Robert Budding
22-Apr-2008, 14:33
Ken,
I've visited your site a number of times during the past several years. I must admit that it's your striking images that keep me coming back, and not the layout (which has always been very good).
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