New UK website, work in progress, opinions please!

[imrtun]

Hi,

I've been working on getting a website together the past couple of weeks. I'm still trying to decide how to execute the home and services pages. But am fairly happy with the rest.

Any thoughts would be most welcome. Many thanks.

http://www.fotu.co.uk (http://www.fotu.co.uk/)

[kingbetro]

Not keen on the use of flash for the most part, but I must say, I do love the gallery. Is that your own doing or did you obtain the code from somewhere?

[imrtun]

Yes,

I can't say I'm a huge fan of flash either. Sadly this picaholic website is the best I can come up with at the moment. If anyone on these forums has the knowledge to convert the site to css/java script with all the effects intact, I would be more than willing to compensate them in £££ or $$$.:D

If anyone is interested, send me a PM.

[Pete]

The Gallery (and none of the other navigation items) aren't working for me (or are unreasonably slow).

What I saw looked ok though.

Corrrection : it's just slow.

[tinygreenalien]

I like the layout, it loads pretty fast with my connection, and the pictures are great! But I would have to agree that the flash is a turnoff. Good luck on the conversion, after working on my own css page and Java galleries I know what a pain it is and I definitely wouldn't mind hiring someone for that!

-Jessa

[Pete]

I think it's just the flash navigation which is a bit of a jolt. It's not all that intuitive, especially with the thumbnails behind the main shot. It makes choosing your indended shot a bit of a hit-and-miss affair.

[Anke]

It just took forever to load and I'm on a pretty fast connection, just think of people on slow connections!
Most surfers have an impossibly small attention span.

[mullkv]

Is it working at the moment? I waited 30 odd seconds and it hadn't loaded...?

[imrtun]

Picaholics hosting does seem to be very hit and miss when it comes to speed.
Hence another reason for wanting a conversion so I can host it myself. Very interested indeed in anybody with the right skills to help me do this!

[spuddevans]

I just had a look at the site, very nice photography. I find the flash slow to load, and that makes navigation slow and frustrating. Maybe if you kept flash for the pics but used html for the other info on the site, maybe that'd be a fair compromise?


Tim

[jesspeterson]

Hi there... I have cable, using firefox browser and it took 40 plus secs to load. Is the home page supposed to be blank, with just your name, because that's all I got. Perhaps it's firefox. I usually don't wait that long for something to load.

[imrtun]

This may be of interest to some.

Hi Imrtun,
We are checking the site speeds and gathering a lot of infomration about the speed now. We are going to be resolving this by actually moving to AMAZONG EC2 SOLUTION. This is a hosting solution provided by Amazon that guarantees faster connection to the internet. They also have more locations, which means, your clients will be picking up servers closer to them (eg UK).

further, we are also moving some of the code to newer version of Flash. This will also speed up the sites.

Time frame for all these changes is expected to take us 6 weeks (+-), but we are working on this as we speak.

Regards,
Avishai Ungar
Picaholic.com
avishai@picaholic.com