New website launched!

[dpastern]

Hey guys, new site is now up and live - few things - the store is not fully functional yet, need to pay a developer to do some stuff for me, and add items for people to buy ;) I also need to add a few flash menus to the image galleries, nothing hard, but fiddly and time consuming, I can do that whilst the site is live without too much hassles.

Can people have a look at give me some feedback on it, especially the macro tips sections.

New site is at the same location as the old site:

http://www.macro-images.com/

Lots of new images, most of which have already been posted on POTN at some time or another.

Dave

[dpastern]

Hey guys, new site is now up and live - few things - the store is not fully functional yet, need to pay a developer to do some stuff for me, and add items for people to buy :wink: I also need to add a few flash menus to the image galleries, nothing hard, but fiddly and time consuming, I can do that whilst the site is live without too much hassles.

Can people have a look at give me some feedback on it, especially the macro tips sections.

New site is at the same location as the old site:

http://www.macro-images.com/

Lots of new images, most of which have already been posted on POTN at some time or another.

Dave

Note: I have made some tough design decisions here - preferring to support IE over FireFox (which despite what the fanboys will say, is NOT a very w3c compliant browser). I've made a decision to code the page for a screen resolution of 1280*1024 - if you're using an older monitor, or a lower resolution, things won't look right. I'm not going to waste time with fancy JS coding to molly coddle the few percentage that use non standard resolutions. I know I sound mean, but in the end, I'm doing a webpage for the masses, not the minority.

[LordV]

Hey guys, new site is now up and live - few things - the store is not fully functional yet, need to pay a developer to do some stuff for me, and add items for people to buy ;) I also need to add a few flash menus to the image galleries, nothing hard, but fiddly and time consuming, I can do that whilst the site is live without too much hassles.

Can people have a look at give me some feedback on it, especially the macro tips sections.

New site is at the same location as the old site:

http://www.macro-images.com/

Lots of new images, most of which have already been posted on POTN at some time or another.

Dave

Lots of lovely images Dave- congrats.
Only negative comment I found it odd to be looking at non macro pics with a large "macro Images" header above them ?

Brian V.

[AdamJL]

Your site is taking forever to load from the UK. I reguarly check out sites in Aus, but yours seems very slow. Still hanging!
And I'm using IE (work browser)

[Attic]

Great front page Dave and an overall excellent site ;)

[GaryT]

Great site Dave and a great set of pics.

[dpastern]

Hey Adam - yeah - the main intro.swf file is 1.2mb - reducing the file size on the images for faster loading killed the quality, and I wanted to showcase my best images and couldn't pick it down to a small lot of 5 or 6 without showing my skills across several genres.

I worked out (and should have noted this in my original post) that the pages are really made for those with DSL - on a 512/128 account it shouldn't take no more than probably 20 seconds for the intro.swf to load. Since that's a slow/medium broadband account, faster connections such as 1500/256, 8000/384 and adsl2+ are EVEN faster. I felt the loading times were reasonably fair. True, the site was never intended for those on dialup (which, ironically enough, I am on lol). Dialup will take quite a while. I probably should edit the main page now that I think about it.

Dave

[dpastern]

Thanks guys.

Brian - yes, it is a bit odd. I'd registered the macro-images domain 18 months ago and it has some time left on the domain registration. When it lapses, I'll probably move to a more generic photography name and change the title to reflect that.

I should have mentioned that the site has been designed with broadband in mind - those on dialup will have a torrid time of viewing the main page ;)

I'm still on dialup, it seems that my new ADSL connection is doomed and will probably result in me paying for the 12 month contract without getting any service :( Crappy phone line, 3km from exchange, and my father insisting on 5 devices on the internal lines all drawing voltage and causing noise issues has made it into a connection only slightly faster than a 256/64 connection on a good day, and dialup on a bad day :( If I can cancel the connection I probably will, looks like I'm stuck with only dialup :(

Dave

[AdamJL]

Hi Dave - I'm not on dialup here. I'm on a very very quick corporate network. I've downloaded lots of items here from many parts of the world, some (like games videos) in the hundreds of megs range, no problem.
Your website just seems to take ages to load. Streaming video from Australia also causes no issues (I regularly download Lateline/730 report Vodcasts and watch 4 corners in my browser as well)
I've just tried your site again, and still no joy.

Let me try from my home connection (24mb) tonight. It could simply be this computer's flash support.

[spidermanrbryce2006]

Greta site, You should throw my photos on there too lol jokes!

[LindaB]

Dave - its looking good, but I could not get anything on the images links - The pop-up blocker kept coming up so I couldnt see any pics no matter which category of images I tried to click on - only saw the scrolling images at the front.

Linda

[dpastern]

Thanks guys.

Linda - you need to add the site to your pop up safe list. What browser are you using? This will be because I've used the "target=_blank" sub tag for my <a href> link tags. Sorry for the double dutch ;)

PS - the site is optomised for broadband connections, those on dialup will have to wait a while before the main intro flash file loads. Due to problems with FireFox, I've had to make changes to the code that makes life a bit harder for IE users. Plus, for some reason I cannot get the flash preloader to work, it should, I've coded it all right, but it *refuses* to work. I'm new to using flash, so hopefully down the track it'll get sorted.

Dave

[dpastern]

Interesting Adam, very interesting. I've tested it from several connections and it's all good. I actually work for my own ISP, although I'm not hosting with them at the moment. I know it's not a problem with the current hosting, others are having no issues viewing it. I have mucked around with the code a bit though - what browser are you using? I have had to do an ugly hack with the <object> code for the flash, to get it to work with FireFox and keep the site w3c compliant. FireFox, despite what some fanboys would say, is *not* a standards compliant browser. The <embed> tag is NOT w3c compliant, and yet nutscrape and its descendants insist on using it for multimedia embedded objects. Even IE gets it right! The ugly hack basically means that IE will not stream flash objects, but will only show them when the flash item has fully downloaded. If I get IE working properly (dead easy to do), FireFox insists on the <embed> tag or it will not show the flash items at all. If I use the <embed> tag, the pages become non w3c compliant, something which is not in my design goals. I like to write good, clean code that complies with standards.

All the html has been written by hand, using notepad. I have used html-kit to do quick checks on the code integrity, and of course the online w3c html validator.

Also - the site is optimised for broadband connections.

Dave

[troypiggo]

I like it. Looks like a lot of work setting it up, and it paid off. Great images too :)

The links don't work properly in Firefox. I know it says "Best viewed IE...", but with FF being big in the market these days, I consider this when writing web pages.

If it's an pop-up block thing, I'd consider putting a note on the front page stating they need to disable it. Pop-up blockers are common too, and with good reason. Without telling people you need to disable it, which they may not like doing BTW, you may have visitors thinking it's a broken site.

Just my 2 bits.

[dpastern]

Thanks Troy. [edit] - what exactly do you mean by it's not working properly on FireFox? I have tested it on Firefox at home and it works perfectly OK for me.

I could add a how to view this site best link I supposed. I'm sort of 2 views on FireFox - it's only 15% of the market, and as a browser it's crap. That's my honest take on FireFox. FireFox has created such a headache for me when designing this new page, it isn't funny. My personal preferences for browsers are Konqueror (on Linux/BSD) or Opera. Opera absolutely KILLS IE, FireFox and any other browser in terms of rendering, speed, lack of exploits, w3c compliance and so forth.

Dave

[dpastern]

Greta site, You should throw my photos on there too lol jokes!

Thanks Bryce! I already have someone else wanting a copy of my pages to use as a template lol. It's not quite as easy as that though...one has to do a lot of manual configuration to get it all working.

Dave

[racketman]

I'd like to see insects identified but I guess it depends who you are aiming the site at.

[troypiggo]

Thanks Troy. - what exactly do you mean by it's not working properly on FireFox? I have tested it on Firefox at home and it works perfectly OK for me.

My bad. The popups weren't working. I mistakenly disabled adblock but left popup block on, so they still didn't show. I have enabled popups for your site and now it appears to display fine.


I could add a how to view this site best link I supposed. I'm sort of 2 views on FireFox - it's only 15% of the market,

This regularly updated site begs to differ.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I'm sure there's many statistical gatherings on the subject. But IMO, if I'm designing webpages and they're made to display correctly in IE and FF, you've certainly got the bulk of the viewers covered guaranteed. Maybe less than 5% are on untested browsers, but chances are they'll display correctly if the majors are.

and as a browser it's crap. That's my honest take on FireFox. FireFox has created such a headache for me when designing this new page, it isn't funny.

We'll have to agree to disagree there. :)
When I'm installing a new system, it's amongst the first software I install after Windows is up and running - along with Thunderbird, and all the antivirus and other security type software and updates of course. I won't even mention GIMP because I know your feelings on that ;)


My personal preferences for browsers are Konqueror (on Linux/BSD) or Opera. Opera absolutely KILLS IE, FireFox and any other browser in terms of rendering, speed, lack of exploits, w3c compliance and so forth.


I haven't used Opera for a while, but I found it's font display ugly. And I'm not sure speed is that much of an issue with broadband and today's computers. I would have expected FF to be right up there with W3C compliance too - moreso than IE.

But I digress. Great job on the site. I know how much work goes into those things. I'm about to start on mine - completely rewriting the gallery (php hand coded with tender, loving care) to use a mysql backend and vastly improved aesthetics.

[dpastern]

I'd like to see insects identified but I guess it depends who you are aiming the site at.

Would be good, but would be a lot of work probably - JAlbum doesn't really let you manually enter details per image, it's all automated. I'd have to manually edit 650+ pages probably. Would be nice though. Then I'd have to ID the suckers lol...joy!

Dave

[dpastern]

Troy - I'm referring to secunia.org bugs (including unpatched stuff). Opera has long had a reputation of having the least amount of security related bugs, and what bugs do happen, get patched, and patched fast. As an example, for Opera 8:

http://secunia.com/product/4932/?task=statistics

Compare this to FireFox 2.x:

http://secunia.com/product/12434/?task=statistics

IE fares worse ;)

As to my Mozilla bash, I just get sick and tired of people bashing IE, when FireFox has it's own issues and they happily (and deliberately) ignore them. As an example, FireFox (as do all nutscrape based browsers) relies on the <embed> tag to show multimedia objects like flash. The <embed> tag is NOT a w3c approved tag. Never has been. The proper tag to use is <object>.

Sadly, FireFox will NOT see the object tag, it MUST have the embed tag. You can do an ugly hack (which is what I've done) and FireFox will see the object tag without using an embed tag, but that screws IE and stops it from both streaming flash, and also checking what version of flash is on a users system (and thus prompting updates). Annoying. Ugly. If I coded this the proper way, FireFox users would *not* see any flash at all. run a w3c html v4.01 transitional en test and you'll see what I mean. I've sent an email about this to the w3c, mozilla firefox, Microsoft and Adobe, and guess who was the only one to respond - Microsoft. Hats off to Microsoft. Doesn't say a lot for the other groups, does it?

And FireFox just looks plain ugly (sorry, I'm not a fan of the GTK).

Thanks for the kind words on the site, and good luck with yours Troy!

Dave