New website, comments please

[razyl]

Hi all,

Just finished a website to display some of my photos. Would like to get feedback on the site, especially load time for photos, picture quality, ease of use & navigation....plus any comments on the photos themselves!

Here's the link: http://www.completefitness.com.au/photos

Thanks
Darryn

[AirBrontosaurus]

Wow. A sharp looking gallery with some really cool shots. I like the layout/interface as well

[SubDude3000]

Fantastic, well captured Photos :)

[MikeMcL]

i really like the gallery style. what builder did you use. the pics you have chosen are stunning, great locations and captures

[razyl]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Mike, I used simpleviewer & autoviewer (free downloads from http:///www.airtightinteractive.com) for the flash content of both the index and slideshow views. I played around with it a fair bit and it's embedded in a fairly simple php page that runs off templates. I'd like to customise the slideshow a bit more so will look at getting the pro version of autoviewer.

Darryn

[jrjphoto]

It's a nice looking photo gallery, but the images take waaaay too long to load. Maybe it's cuz I'm in the US and you're in Australia. But the parent site loaded pretty quick. I'd want to run those gallery photos through Photoshop and compress them a whole bunch. Other than that, it looks fantastic! :)

[razyl]

Hi jrjphoto, thanks for that feedback, i am worried the photos would take too long. I've saved them with low quality in photoshop, but how do you recommend compressing them? I havent done that before so talk me through it!

[jrjphoto]

In Photoshop, make the images the height/width that they need to be to look good and yet fit most browsers. I like to make mine somewhere around 800 px wide (or tall). On my current site, they are no more than 640px wide (or tall) to make room for the navigation bar.

So, resize your images.

Next, if you're using any version of Photoshop 7 or better (including Elements 3) there is a thingie underneath your Save, Save as... dialogue under File that's called Save for Web. Click on that. It's super good at getting rid of extra color information and therefore making your files smaller so they load faster. This is the compression part. :)

I would use JPEG (.jpg) at High Quality (which is probably around 60-80%, whatever looks good—and the image viewer will show you a preview of the picture with those compression settings you're specifying so make it look nice, but watch the file size and try to keep it around 200KB).

That's pretty much it. Once you're satisfied with your preview image, just save it to whatever your image directory is for your website. Just don't save over your original file. That would kinda suck. :)

Take a look at my website/gallery (http://www.jrjphoto.net) thingie and you'll see what I did. No photo is over 640 pixels wide or tall and the file sizes are about 100KB.

Also, if you're doing thumbnails, find out how small you want them and make those thumbnails that size... that way they are super tiny and download super fast. I can wait a few seconds for a high res image to download, but not for a hundred thumbnails which are actually just the high res images scaled down in the browser.

Also, thumbnails don't need to be super high quality so you can just save them as regular JPEGs at medium compression and that'll work just fine. Just be sure you're saving them in the thumbs folder and not in the images folder where your big images are. Otherwise, folks will just be staring at thumbnails all day with a ton of dead space.

Hope this helps. :)

[razyl]

perfect, thanks!

[jrjphoto]

No problem. Let me know if it works or if what I told you sucks monkey rectum. Whichever. :cool:

[azpix]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Mike, I used simpleviewer & autoviewer (free downloads from http:///www.airtightinteractive.com) for the flash content of both the index and slideshow views. I played around with it a fair bit and it's embedded in a fairly simple php page that runs off templates. I'd like to customise the slideshow a bit more so will look at getting the pro version of autoviewer.

Darryn

razyl,

did you end up getting autoviewer pro? if so, how do you like it.

[razyl]

Hi there,
No didnt get the autoviewer pro, although for the slideshow style it would be good to lose the numbers at the top etc.
My latest simpleviewer set up is here: http://www.mckayphotography.com.au/photos/tibet
Darryn

[azpix]

Hi there,
No didnt get the autoviewer pro, although for the slideshow style it would be good to lose the numbers at the top etc.
My latest simpleviewer set up is here: http://www.mckayphotography.com.au/photos/tibet
Darryn


Wow. Great site. You've been to some amazing places.

I'm thinking about getting pro just to get rid of the download button.