Petey Photography

[GenuineRolla]

Just got my site up and running a week or so ago. It'll take a lil bit of time to load...its a 11MB .swf file...i'm trying to figure out how I can get it to be smaller. I'm also looking to put in a preloader before the preloader. any tips on that would be great as well.

http://www.peteyphotography.com

Let me know what you think, could be improved, etc.

[and.duncan]

I'd have to say at 11mb you're going to be excluding a lot of people. there's studies about how long people are willing to wait for webpages to load and while I don't remember the time I do remember it was surprisingly short.

Haven't looked yet, waiting to load :) Perhaps you could break it up into a fairly small 'cover page' .swf, with links to galleries etc?

-edit-
once it's loaded, the site looks great. easy to navigate (i like the scrolling picture thing... is like a slideshow you have more control over, i just left the mouse where it was and clicked as a new picture came up when i was ready). Pictures are good too :)

[GenuineRolla]

Thank you sir.

The reason why it takes so long to load, is that it loads all of the pictures that I have on that first slide show. Since not all of them are small files, it'll take some time, accordingly. The other galleries, should pop open in a new page and load right up. I just gotta work on the main site.

I'm thinking if I make the file sizes smaller, it'll load a lot faster.

Thanks!

[photoguy6405]

This may come off as kind of harsh, but here goes. I let it load because I was critiquing. If I were a potential customer I probably would have backed out before it got halfway done.

Once it did load there was... music! *gasp!* Death. Didn't go any farther. Sorry.

[mr_e]

Yeah, the studies hover around people spending no longer than 10-30 seconds for a page to load, at 11megs you're looking at alienating...probably all dial up and quite a few cable users.

After I did let it load, as photoguy said, music is generally a bad idea, people have their own music, or something, and don't wanna hear somebody else's music, especially if they don't like it, just my suggestion though.

Then there's the issue with search engines not being able to index flash sites, but that's a design trade off.

Aside from that it's a nice site, and your photos look good too, so good job on that :)

[RyanCrane]

Yeah have to agree. Im on a T1 connection and it took me too long to load that.

And I can download full movies in 20 minutes.. lol

[V8Rumble]

First, people hate music in websites. Well I do anyway. Same with sound sfx like that cheesy shutter sound. If I cant get rid of those, I get rid of the site I am browsing.

Separate samples images from the main page to reduce file size. I also don't like scrolling in flash, they are like iframes. Info should be there right away onces the pages loads. Speaking of info, where the heck are the Streets of the Northeast? I have no idea where you reside.

[setcode]

next please .....
you have to save photos for web .........

[KevinAldrich]

You asked for a critique, well, here goes nothing.

It takes way too long to load. I'm on an 80Mbps connection provided by my school, faster than what 99% of your visitors are going to be having, and it took 34 seconds for it to load. Nobody is going to wait that long for your website to load. I don't care if it's loading all of the images, because nobody is ever going to see them.

Second, don't automatically play music. It drives people crazy, including me, when I'm sitting here in my quiet room and some website starts blaring noise through my speaker, leaving me frantically searching for a way to turn it off. Music adds nothing to your website, leave it out.

Lastly, the thumbnails in the corner are far too small to be worth anything. You can't tell what the image is of, or even get a general idea, because they are so small.

[hennebury22]

Yeah, it took my computer about 3-5 minutes.

[neil_r]

I am sitting on the end of a 20 meg pipe and this was slow. People won't give it the time (which is a shame as the site shows promise)