New image, and webpage!

[Joergeske]

So after a few very solid days of work teaching myself html, and some flash here and there and scouring the net for hours finding tidbits of help here and there I have created a new website. Yes I know it uses iframes and flash, but honestly im not worried about search engine traffic as much as I probably should be right now. There are a few small technical details here and there that I need to work out, but I am happy with it at the moment. The site was framed in css, the menu was purchased and then edited, the pages are all zenfolio, or wordpress based, every aspect of the site was designed to by dynamic and fully upgradeable with little to no issues. The site can also be updated live from anywhere because of the use of wordpress and zenfolio, and to me this was worth the slightly more pleasing appearance of designing all my galleries and pages from scratch. I hope I did a well enough job of integrating everything together though.

I also created new business cards that are 2.5" square, and these new ads, the new logo, and watermark as well.

Joseph Geske Photography (http://www.joergeske.com)

and here is a gallery of images with the watermark in use

Samples (http://joergeske.zenfolio.com/samples)

[Highlight_Photography]

Slideshow takes too long to load (40 seconds). If I wasen't timing it I would of already closed the page after 5 seconds of waitin.

[Joergeske]

Hmmm, ive been trying to cut loading time down on the slideshow, on my end its only about 15 seconds with a clear cache. Grand total the slideshow is about 920Kb which I have always used as kind of a reference point for flash movies. I might need into a different rotator that can que the images. What kind of connection are you on?

Also anything constructive beyond the slideshow?

[SAB_Click]

Same here - I gave up. :(

[Joergeske]

Again that is so very strange, ive viewed it at quite a few places now and its never taken longer than 20 seconds to load. I will look into minimizing the number of pictures and their compression though. So nothing else to say other than the slideshow taking to long?

[jgrussell]

Takes too long to load and the transitions between images are not attractive at all. The images themselves are fine.

[Joergeske]

Ok, well I went with a different transition and now the files load progressively so it should be quite a bit better. I also changed the flipping logo a bit so that it has larger font.

[Hikin Mike]

I didn't see it before the changes. It loaded pretty fast for me.

You have way too much white space on the bottom. I have to scroll horizontally a bit. The text on the Gallery gets cut off on the right...I looked only at the Landscape photos.

A 2.5" x 2.5" business card? I could even read it. You really think somebody is going to see those pictures? Looks like the red text is bleeding on the white.

[GwagDesigns]

If you changed the quality of the slideshow images, its noticeable, they appear a tad pixelated. are you using JPEGs? If you are, have you tried saving as a GIF? they tend to be smaller in size and I use .gif a lot on my site and .png for page elements. Other wise, I think if you managed to find a suitable output for the slideshow images, and centered up the slideshow itself more, the site itself looks good.

[AlphaChicken]

I didn't see it before the changes. It loaded pretty fast for me.

You have way too much white space on the bottom. I have to scroll horizontally a bit. The text on the Gallery gets cut off on the right...I looked only at the Landscape photos.


I agree about the white space being too big.

If you changed the quality of the slideshow images, its noticeable, they appear a tad pixelated. are you using JPEGs? If you are, have you tried saving as a GIF? they tend to be smaller in size and I use .gif a lot on my site and .png for page elements. Other wise, I think if you managed to find a suitable output for the slideshow images, and centered up the slideshow itself more, the site itself looks good.

The images DO look like you compressed them a lot. They don't look pixelated, they look compressed. Big difference.


Overall I really like the site. You also have some badass landscape images in there. Very nice. Is close to great success!

[Joergeske]

Thanks guys, the white space is because I dont have control over zenfolio, so I cant force my iframes to dynamically resize to accommodate the show all function in zen. Thus my div that holds the iframe has to be 1500 tall. I will look into the compression issues, they are at about 6/10ths compression to keep all 30 images below 1meg. I will look into using less compression.

[Joergeske]

Oh and as for the biz cards, the printed copies are quite nice actually. I was surprised myself.

[SAB_Click]

Joe

Just to give another perspective rather than say nothing; I'm not a great fan of red as a corporate colour based on research I read about years ago. Apparently (often subconsciously) people associate it with negative things, such as anger, debt, trouble, warning, etc. When presented with a choice people would often select the alternatives away from the red ones.

My immediate reaction when I saw your site/cards yesterday was that they looked like a splattered coke can. When the site took too long to load (which I accept may now be fixed) I just gave up because I didn't like the general feel of the site to justify spending any more time persisting.

I'm not saying this for the sake of being unnecessarily critical, rather to be helpful. You need to get a balance of views and then run with what YOU feel most comfortable with.

[Faolan]

Initial load time for the site 9 seconds before it did anything. Too long...

The site is confusing, as you end up breaking navigation. The sub-nav animation needs to be overhauled as the tab leader is 'broken', ie it doesn't look right.

It fails w3c (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.joergeske.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&No200=1&verbose=1) validation.

You have too much dead space at the bottom.

On the blog why does your text change to red when rolling over? Roll-over text colour is for navigation...

Blog breaks the site badly, but I'll assume that you're working on that.

I would also review the usage of space in general and the colour scheme. Visit Adobe Kuler if you need inspiration.

Galleries crash against the edge of the browser, leading to a cramped feel.

Click me is probably the most pointless piece of Flash I've ever seen.

iFrames (or any type of frame) are a big no, no. These days they are considered by some AV software suites to be for malware (which one such attack vector). They break navigation and make sites a nightmare to use/navigate. iFrames are for specific purposes loading pages isn't one of them.

[Joergeske]

Thanks, I understand the issue with red. Ive seen a lot of this research, but I like it and its the direction I want to take. I do appreciate the comments though. I am still confused as to why load time would be so long, i am being 100% honest when I tell you that the site has never taken anything more than a 1-2 seconds to load on all the machines I have tried it on. I am working on optomizing the flash in the top corner to improve the speed of it (which seems to be the only slow element on the page.

As for iframes, until I see a better solution to integrating a gallery system like smugmug or zen into a site then I will kneel before all that hate my iframes. Yes they can be a bit odd, yes they can do strange things to the nav structure, and yes all the pros seem to hate them. However, the sites that really turn me off are the ones with flash on the front end and no seemlessway to get to their galleries. Those sites are horrible, talk about hard to navigate, there becomes no way to return from your zenfolio site. I just think it is odd how quickly people jump to say iframes are so bad when for everything im using them for I have yet to find a real issue with them on a single computer except the resizing issue. Sorry it just feels like the last comment was a bit hostile (i am sure it was not intended that way, but it can be very discouraging to read 10 negative things in a row about a site I spent days on), I appreciate all the constructive criticism.

[SAB_Click]

Joe

The load speed issues may have something to do with the topology of networks and where the site is hosted. I am not sure where you are or where the site is hosted and what the infrastructure is in between, but it is perfectly feasible that you, the other machines which you have accessed the site from and the hosting server are all on a 'common' high bandwidth infrastructure. Others may be accessing it via more protracted routes, thinner pipes and bottle necks.

You need to plan the functionality of the site to accommodate this if this is the case.

[AlphaChicken]

The site loads perfectly fine for me.

[Joergeske]

Thanks guys, I will continue to work on load times. I understand how networks can come into play and even geographic location, so far I have tested it for speed on 5 different machines, a work machine that is on a vpn out of minnesota (I am in KS) it was no doubt the slowest to load it but at around 6 seconds it still felt ok to me. I also have my work laptop on an aircard and was able to pull it up in around 5 seconds. Who knows, I need to pull out some network monitoring software and see exactly how much bandwidth is needed to load the site.

[SAB_Click]

Approx 15 seconds now in UK - hope that helps.

[Thierry boudan]

load times were fine

not pixelated - clean images


why have meta data???? customers dont need it made it look flicr like not individual

too much white 4 my taste however the blue behind the images looked tacky

check out jalbum 4 slideshows still can put it in your iframe

[Thierry boudan]

oh dont stress about load times in my opinion customer expect to wait for decent images on good images are worth waiting 4 - photographers dont tend to wait coz hey our stuff is always better any way lol