OT: New website, need feedback

I've just put my website "on the air". I would like to know how the site is working on

other computers and general feedback and critique.

 

The photography page is:

 

http://brucealangreene.com/photographs.html

 

I chose to post in this forum as I admire many of your discussions and leica photo

postings. Also, many of the photographs on my site are shot with rangefinder

cameras.

 

Thanks!

I have two nitpicks: reduce the dimensions of the images. I shouldn�t have scroll around trying to fit each image into my fully open browser window--only to find a lot of them don�t quite fit after all. It�s too much screwing around. Also, consider linking the images so I can just click on the current image to progress through the collection. You have a lot of very good photos here, glad you posted the link.

You've got some good photos.... not sure about the organization,

or lack of it. Agree it would be better to link the pictures together

so you don't need to go back to the thumbnails each time.

btw, I don't mind the size. In fact I've been thinking lately for

myself it's sometimes preferable to be able to see things larger

and in more detail and just scroll if need be. These don't seem

too oversize to be troublesome.

BG,

 

You have some nice images on your site... like Ray, I don't have a problem with the

image sizes. I'd rather see a little bit more than too little.

 

The other way of dealing with the thumbnail images is to have them all located on a

sidebar. Then, when you drag the mouse over the images, they enlarge themselves in

an area outside the sidebar.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Cheers

Even with a high-speed connection, the page takes too long to load.

 

You should reduce the file size of your thumbnails. Currently, they seem to run about 22k. You have ... what ... about 50 photos? 50 photos x 22k is 1 megabyte. That's way too large. People on a slower connection will give up and move on before the page finishes loading.

 

And that would be a shame, because you have some very nice work here.

 

Reducing the thumbnails to 10k each still gives you a page that's roughly 500k. I would make them slightly smaller and with slightly more compression.

I agree with Mike, but you could make them even smaller (k byte wise)

<p>I'm surprised it's displayed at all. What kind of HTML is this, with a

"spacer" tag, etc.? See <a

href="http://htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbrucealangreene.com%2Fphotographs.html+&warnings=yes&input=yes">this

page</a> for a revelation of how it rates against the 4.01 Transitional

that it claims to be.</p><p>Syntax errors aside, there are basic HTML

problems; notably that the whole thing is in a table whose width is set

at 1022 pixels. What if your browser window is narrower than this? You

have to scroll horizontally. Uck.</p><p>Sorry to be so negative, but I'm

not necessarily blaming you. A meta tag implies that this is produced by

Adobe GoLive. If that's so, uninstall and delete Adobe GoLive.</p>

Great shots, very good presentation. Size is perfect, load is fast bloody well done!<P><a href="http://tinyurl.com/3fg89"><b>Two Young Girls</b></a> has a classic TriX look / feel and

<a href="http://brucealangreene.com/photoswebfolder/syncroswimmers.html"><b>Syncronized Swimmers </b></a> is a hoot.<P>Now I gotta stir it up -- First decent Leica Post I've seen in a coons age.

Yes, the photo of two girls is great. I'm not keen on the photo of the

building with the toadstool sky, but you have some excellent photos. My

criticism above is purely of the markup for the opening page, not of the

photos.

heh........cool validator Peter........dont take it to heart too much though bg...although im sure it's all valid errors.........run "photo.net" thru it........

 

;o)

No problem navigating. I personally do not like clicking the next

buttoms. This way I can pick and choose and and not look at the ones I am not interested in. Thumbnails on a side bar usually are way too small. I don`t know much about web design, but if you could leave the thumbnail window up and have a new window open when an image is clicked, the thumbs wouldn`t need to be reloaded each time. I`m using dsl so mine is fast enough as is.

 

BTY, I liked many of your pictures.

I like it. It is simple and that's why I like it. You click to get the picture and go back to click on another one. I don't like it when pics are too small so I enjoyed your picture sizes but perhaps 10% reduction in size would reduce the scrolling on an average monitor. I like most of the pictures with the exception of you sitting in a bathroom. ;-)

I like it! Great images. I like the mix of subject matter. Loads fast enough for me. Good job.

Nice images. A couple of things.

 

1. As others have said, the images are little large. Try 600 pixels for max width.

 

 

2. Better navigation would be nice.

 

 

3. Don't worry about having invalid HTML. Photo.net and most other sites on the net don't conform to any HTML standard. I noticed that you used Adobe Golive to create the pages. Practicaly any web design program generates "invalid" code. Unless you are willing to code everything by hand with xhtml book sitting in front of you, validity is futile quest.

 

 

matt

<p><em>Don't worry about having invalid HTML. Photo.net and most

other sites on the net don't conform to any HTML

standard.</em></p><p>How about "Don't worry if your photos are boring.

Most photos are boring"? Most people's photos <em>are</em> boring

(mine certainly are), but so? Should we just give up?</p><p>It's certainly

true that photo.net has M$IE-proprietary and otherwise crappy markup.

I've no idea why. What Would Philip Greenspun Say?</p><p><em>I

noticed that you used Adobe Golive to create the pages. Practicaly any

web design program generates "invalid" code. Unless you are willing to

code everything by hand with xhtml book sitting in front of you, validity

is futile quest.</em></p><p>First, no, GoLive is particularly bad. (So is

FrontPage.) There are exceptions: <a

href="http://www.chami.com/html-kit/">HTML-Kit</a> and <a

href="http://www.w3.org/Amaya/">Amaya</a> are among the good

programs and they're both free. Secondly, tagging by hand is easy; I'm

doing it right now -- and there's no (X)HTML book in sight. Thirdly, you

don't tag <em>everything</em> by hand; you semi-automate it with <a

href="http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~dbareis/ppwizard.htm"

title="exemplified by another free program, this one for a variety of

operating systems">preprocessing</a> or similar.</p><p><a title="by

Philip Greenspun" href="http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/html">Learn

to program HTML in 21 minutes</a>.</p>

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Much appreciated.

 

As for writing my own html? What is tagging? Sorry guys, I'll never program even in

html. Just thinking about it gives me a headache. I admire all of you that can do this

easily. I'm just satisfied if the site plays for everyone. If it's a little slow, I can live with

it.

 

I did not design the site for dial-up. The real purpose of the site is for video display

of my professional work. I'm ok with loosing the dial-up viewers.

 

But the thought of shrinking the size of 50 photos and re-uploading the pages - that

will be a lot of work. I guess I keep my monitor at a high pixel display, even though

it's only a 19in crt. The photos look small on it, but I can squeeze more pallets in

photoshop into the screen.

 

Thanks again,

-bruce