Another 'check out my new site' thread...

[klynam]

"Physician, heal thyself."
"The cobbler's kids have no shoes."

You know, there's some truth to those sayings...lol

Anyway, I'm a marketing and visual communication designer by trade (photography by passion) and I finally took 3-straight days out of my schedule to put together my own site.

www.KLYNAM.com (bandwidth alert, 2mb's to load)

Pretty basic stuff really, built in SwishMax2.

But the "look-n-feel" was exactly what I had in mind - which is good because let me tell you something: as a designer one of the hardest things you'll ever do is design your own marketing materials!

Comments welcome, critiques tolerated - for the most part ;)

[OdiN1701]

Took about 20 seconds to load (I'm on 10MBit cable too) so I would say that's a problem.

[klynam]

hmmmm...took 20 sec to load? That's definitely not good.

I get a consistent 800K download speed where I'm at and it takes about 5-8 seconds. Of course it IS on my personal web space w/ Time Warner Cable and my ISP is TWC so maybe it's faster to internal customers for some reason.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll check into optimizing further - or getting it on another server...

[xpscodes.com]

Took less than 5 seconds to load in FF and IE. I'm on a 7 mbps cable.

Site looks great, is that done by you?.

[klynam]

Yes - I designed and built it.

[mattograph]

10 + mps cable. Loaded 2 seconds.

Sweet site!!!

[OdiN1701]

I wouldn't host a site on personal web space.

I'm on Comcast.

Just ran a speed test. Not super accurate, but close enough.

I should say that the interface came up quickly, but the "loading" part is what took forever.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/283405024.png

[CanadianKitKat]

Only took a couple seconds for me to load and I have what I like to refer to as "rural high speed" which doesn't tend to be nearly as fast as DSL, but is nothing like dial up either.

I have to say, that is one of the coolest websites I think I've ever seen! Love, love, love it.

[klynam]

Thank you CKK, glad you like it :-) And thanks for the extra info Odi...

[Eric2007]

Very nice site!

The one thing I noticed though was when I selected "Photography", it changed images and then I click on the image to enter and it opened a new tab in IE however, IE didn't automatically switch me to the new tab, I had to manually select it....I am not sure if that is a web design issue or maybe IE issue?? Other than that querk...very nice!

[klynam]

I tried to make a few tweaks to improve the load time - not sure it helped much. Still need to get it on a real server I suppose. I also improved the actual on-screen appearance with cleaner text and photos, etc. And last but not least, updated my Exposure Manager site to the same appearance.

www.KLYNAM.com
http://klynam.exposuremanager.com

Guess that will have to do for a while. I really appreciate everyone's feedback...

[AndreaBFS]

I have a bit of an issue with the teeny, tiny little navigational boxes to switch between the images/screenshots. Not incredibly intuitive for me. Otherwise it looks great. :)

[mr_e]

I have a bit of an issue with the teeny, tiny little navigational boxes to switch between the images/screenshots. Not incredibly intuitive for me. Otherwise it looks great. :)

Same here, it was obvious once I saw them, but I hadn't even noticed them until I was most of the way through the site

Very nice site by the way, I appreciate the lack of music too

Aside from that why flash? As you can see it takes people on cable about 10 seconds to load (about the same for me too), you could do something similar without flash and it would load so much faster, especially for all of us without cable (or dsl/t1/t3)

[sugbo]

wow - site looks pretty nice. I am in Singapore right now though and even on broadband this site take forever to load (although you may not be too worried about marketing to this part of the world). I would say a 2mb load for the homepage is going to take too long for most folks. Some people may have great bandwidth but others don't and even if you've got broadband the networks can get slow sometimes and you will find alot of people will "bounce" on your site.

my two cents

[klynam]

I don't know that it's the "flash" pre se. I think what's slowing it down is:

1) All images on the site 90%-100% jpg quality for best possible appearance. I could shave off 25-50% of the total site size by going down to 60%-80% quality setting, but I can tell the difference in image quality. (Frankly I don't know that most other people would ever notice it though.)
2) I'm preloading the entire site when the viewer first hits the page. That takes longer initially, but after that everything flies.
3) I still have the site on my Time-Warner personal webspace. I'm guessing this is a big part of the speed delay for some people, why others zip right through.

I'll try putting the site on another server and moving the image quality down to 80% across the board. Let's see how much those help...

[AndreaBFS]

You could load the framework first, then split everything else up into separate movie clips that load in the background as the user browses and/or requests them. That is, if you're worried about the size. For me, it wasn't too much of an issue.

[klynam]

I posted the site temporarily to another (i.e. "real") server and the download to my box took about 3 seconds. That's down from 5-10 before. I also tried reducing the image quality to 80% jpg on all the images and that only saved about 400K which - to my mind - wasn't a sufficient tradeoff for the degredation in image quality. Trying to get the dns rerouted to the new server location today. I'll also add a way to improve help users know more intuitively where the navigation links are...back w/ ya later in the day...