New Website

[Carl Couchman]

Hi All,

I rebuilt my website. Hope you like it!

Carl



http://www.couchmanphoto.com

[Eric Rose]

Beautiful photography. However I think using Flash is a mistake in today's world of iPad etc.

[SamReeves]

Looks great!

[Leigh]

It comes up as a blank screen here. Pure white with no visible content.

Flash is blocked on this machine as a security risk. I couldn't view it if I wanted to.

You really need to use a non-Flash presentation, since that medium is not supported on many platforms.

- Leigh

[Carl Couchman]

Hi All,

Sorry I forgot to mention that it is a flash based site so you must have flash installed on your computer in order to view the site.

Those using iphones etc. wont be able to view it at this time.

Fortunately my film is still compatible with enlargers and my vinyl records are still compatible with turntables.

Cheers,

Carl

[Leigh]

Those using iphones etc. wont be able to view it at this time.
Fortunately my film is still compatible with enlargers and my vinyl records are still compatible with turntables.

Quite some irony in those two statements.

You disparage older technologies on the one hand, but refuse to embrace modern ones.

I'm sure you'll go far, perhaps not in the direction you would prefer.

- Leigh

[Brian K]

Hi Carl, I've had a Flash site for about 12 years and will be releasing a non flash version in the next week or two.

I looked at your web site, some nice work, but I found it a little inefficient to view and I don't see how you're benefitting from flash, I still had to wait on individual images to load and you, like me, don't use any of the really flashy affects that flash is good at. Your site could be replicated non flash without any apparent loss of function.

The inefficiency I found comes from you either having to view the thumbnails or a larger, but not large enough image. It's hard to scroll through them, at first I kept clicking the window closed and then went back to the thumbnails. It took a while to find the hidden forward/back button but that button tends to wander around the images and is not consistently in the same spot. There's also a serious delay in passing over them and their choosing to appear, so if you pass over them quickly they simply do not appear. So it's easy to assume that there are no buttons and that you must go back to the thumbnails.

Most people initially don't want to go through every image, or in the order you decide, which is what the single image dominating the window does. So you end up going back to the thumbnails.

And getting back to the whole non flash thing, my new website will be able to sense when the site is being viewed on a phone, iPad, laptop or desktop and will resize to suit. And while there are many phones that are not flash limited, you'll find that for the people most likely willing and able to buy your work, that a higher proportion of them are on Apple products. And Apple has sold already 100 Million iPhones, and that estimated sales of ipads are at between 30 and 40 Million a year. That's quite an audience to be missing out on. So you might want to take that into account....

Anyway, best of luck with your website.

[Carl Couchman]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for all the well considered and well received constructive feedback.

I will be able to refer back to these tips when I go to rebuild again in the future. In hindsight I like the look and feel of the new site compared to my old one however the whole flash/apple incompatibility issue makes it feel like I made a step forward and a step back.

Thanks again everyone!

Carl

[engl]

I'd advice to get Google Analytics (looks like it may be provided to you by Wix?). It will give you statistics about site visitors, including tablet/smartphone usage data. My experience is that these devices account for only a tiny fraction of actual web views, but the sites I have Analytics access to are not photography related.

I'd want to get away from Flash eventually, or have a separate HTML version for those without flash or on mobile devices (with a presentation optimized for smartphones/tablets), but don't be too concerned with those who will tell you that having a Flash webpage is the end of the world.

The photography on you page looks great. There are a couple of things I'd change in the presentation. The transitions on mouse over in the gallery page are rather slow, and the description is not shown until the end of this transition. The description should have "mouseEnabled" set to false in order to not catch the mouse clicks. The thumbnails, on mouse over, end up too big and overlap other thumbnails as well as page navigation. The buttons for next/previous page should have a bigger clickable area, this can be done with a transparent rectangle in the button graphics. When viewing images full size, there should be better separation from the page behind. At the moment images and text behind interfere with the image viewed, one possible solution is showing images on white. You could do that by putting the image on a white rectangle as big as the flash site. When viewing an image the description/mini-navigation sometimes disappears and will not return unless moving the mouse in and out from the image, I'd probably make it fixed (above the image?) or not display it at all.

[KenM]

Love the photography, and I won't get into the whole Flash discussion, as it's already been covered.

One comment about viewing the enlarged photos - the navigation text at the bottom of the page is slightly visible at the bottom of the photographs. This adds a distraction to the bottom of the image, especially when you have a light area at the bottom. For example, 'dunes'.....

I would either move the nav text up slightly, or fade it out when viewing an image.