Suggestions on my site please

[Ken Lee]

Any feedback or suggestions would be kindly appreciated.

[Deane Johnson]

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?

[sparq]

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?

[lenser]

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]

The layout is great, wonderful content.

I have visited your site in the past; the images are loading slower than previously.

[Ken Lee]

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]

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.

[lenser]

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]

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]

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.