freshly redone website --- much faster!

[holymuchos]

alrighty, the flash gallery utility on my old site was making it rather slow. i redid the colorscheme, added much larger images, and optimized it. the new site is MUCH faster and i think a little more stylish than the old. i'll let you guys decide...

www.zoomoutphotography.com

ps. anyone know of good shopping cart software??

cheers.
philip

[Carzee]

holymuchos batman. yes its fast and lean alright. Sorry I don't know about carts.

Today I just tried doing a flash gallery, first one. I did the gallery in html on the weekend, and today I've done in simpleviewer.

Your galleries have comparitively few pics and my new gallery has a heap of them; the pix are about 300kb/900wide each on average. So it would choke dialup of course. But dialup is way in the minority I think. What I notice with your site is the pre-loading or intelligent loading of pix. And with mine. So the flash version appears to be better for the user.

gallery in html
http://www.camerajuice.com/ccc
gallery in flash
http://www.camerajuice.com/ccc/viewer

Why did you go with flash?

[holymuchos]

Why did you go with flash?

I originally had simpleviewer as you have on your site. Since I wanted the whole site to stay inside static dimensions, I had to keep the pictures rather small to fit. plus, simpleviewer loads up all the full-size versions when you load the page. to combat this issue, it just use lightweight thumbnails and then link to the larger picture (800px/~150kb). I "save for web" inside photoshop with 60% on most pics and the difference is hardly noticeable (I can barely tell, and I look at my pictures everyday), but it greatly reduces the size. Thumbs are also optimized and are only 1-4kb apiece.

Unfortunately some of my customers are still on dialup and/or on smaller screen resolutions, so I had to make some tradeoffs. Either learn how to use flash better (I have no flash experience), or just ditch the flash and generate all in html/css. As you can see, the latter was chosen. Best of luck with simpleviewer on your site. Your black and white skills are excellent, even with the potential problems of the harsh backlights in some photos. good job!!

[Carzee]

I found the simpleviwer simple to setup alright. Flash is getting more popular all the time. I found that guy thru his Flickr interface which is very cool:

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/

.. music pix are everywhere on Flickr, and probably muso's themsleves looking for a stylish look. Flickr's searchability tags mean your pix will get seen, assuming someone can spell the band name properly.

[Sweedishcarrot01]

nice front page

[holymuchos]

thanks guys for all the comments!!

[ChrisBlaze]

very nice, when will you teach me so I can quit paying for smugmug :)

[holymuchos]

very nice, when will you teach me so I can quit paying for smugmug :)

haha. it's not too hard. i learned most everything over a weekend. take a look at www.w3schools.com. look at the "learn xhtml" and "learn css" in the upper left corner. best of luck!

most everything i do is self taught....even photography.

philip

[EOS mE]

nice site there philip... very lean and clean. simple too. as for shopping carts.. since you know about website building.. u can check out oscommerce.com it's an open source shopping cart/ website system. but i'm not even a website beginner yet... so i'm still stuck. haha.

i have a template to build off of.. but the template has so much frame in there that i'm having trouble getting simple viewer to display in big photos. the borders around the simple viewer is so thick i can't seem to reduce it. any tips?

[holymuchos]

i have a template to build off of.. but the template has so much frame in there that i'm having trouble getting simple viewer to display in big photos. the borders around the simple viewer is so thick i can't seem to reduce it. any tips?

first off thanks for the comments about my site!! to get bigger pictures, you can change the "maxImageWidth" and "maxImageHeight" parameters inside the xml file where you put the image filenames. (i think the line is at the very top). to reduce the huge border around the photos, decrease the "frameWidth". the default is something like 40px. also, the "stagePadding" is the space between the photo's border and the thumbnails. you can also reduce this value if you want. if everything is still small, remember that simpleviewer resides inside a flash movie, so if the space allowed for the movie is 400x500, then the biggest photo you can display (assuming that you have no thumbnails, is 400x500). this limitation might be due to the constraints of the frames inside your template. check out this line that you insert in your html:

var fo = new SWFObject("viewer.swf", "viewer", "100%", "100%", "7", "#ff00ff");

the 100%'s mean that the movie will fill 100% of the space it is given in the html page. you can also change these to be static values (in pixels) instead of percentages.

if you are still having trouble, pm me and maybe we can talk further.


best of luck!!