Please critique my new website. Beta version

I have been a reader and sometime contributor for quite a while and enjoy the give and take. I've just finished totally revamping my website. All of the non square images are from Leica cameras. I shoot with R's and M's. I would love to read comments about the site or about the photos. I am a working professional so you may not see cutting edge art here. Thanks for the look.

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http://www.kirktuck.com/new

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There is a link to our older html site but the link on the Beta site is not live. To go to the old site just go to :

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http://www.kirktuck.com

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I would appreciate any honest feedback.

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Kirk R. Tuck

Great pictures! I enjoyed it tremendously! They are so rich. Your

range of technique and composition is so broad and so deep, I felt as

if I just had a lesson with a master. I never thought about bokeh or

DOF while looking at them, they were just pure joy. Thanks very much.

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To ask the obvious geek question: what range of equipment did you

use for the portraits and the city scapes?

The few pictures I saw were very nice but the whole site is very slow

in loading.

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regards

Reinier

A great site, both in terms of its presentation and content. I don't

know that all the camera talk in the FAQ is necessary. I don't think

potential corporate clients need to know too much about the virtues

of the M--but you're in the business and I'm not!

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If I were a potential client, I might like to see some of those

images in their final form, if they were used in ads or annual

reports, etc. Maybe there's a way you could present

some "tearsheets." A client might get some new ideas that way. Just

a thought.

Kirk, some thoughts off the top of my head:<P>

(1) Don't clobber people with a 600 KB flash movie up front without

warning. Really uncool. Just have a super-quickie flash intro and

then, once they are in your site and ready to view things, hit them

with longer movies.<P>

(2) After the "street" flash movie completed downloading, you still get

the "loading..." graphic displayed (BTW, I'm using the latest v6 "MX"

Flash plug-in).<P>

(3) You may wish to think about requiring users to download over 1 MB

of "interface" prior to being able to view any images up-close. A bit

excessive, no?

(4) You can save bandwidth by using Flash to HTTP link to separate JPEG

image files. That way you can keep the flash for the interface and

spare users the 400-500 KB downloads for all the images in a topic even

if they only want to view one or two photos.

(5) Good quality photos though! Good tone and colour (a lot of photo

sites get this really wrong).

Just to take a different tack from Andrew, if you are seeking $$$

corporate clients (as you are), having the whizbanging-est Flash site

is important. Those very companies have paid big bucks for their

sites, so they'll appreciate seeing yours.

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I wouldn't worry that the average dial-up user will have some

difficulty with your site.

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If a potential corporate client can't load your pages, he probably

can't afford your services.

Kirk,

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I enjoyed your photos and writings at photo.net; and I also liked your

old site. The new one I find uncool. Having flash-y stuff impresses,

IMHO, kids. I am on a fast network; think in several Mbps, and the

speed issue did not crop up, but I use Netscape on Unix (Solaris), and

flash did not work properly. In other words, your site is OS

dependent, again not a good thing.

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Of course, if all your prospective clients use PCs, and they have this

kind of taste, the website is probably OK. But if I were you, I'd have

a simple, effective interface.

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Regards

The site was very clodgy and slow when we were running it out of the secondary folder on the site during beta. It is much much faster now. Also, we

polled a large selection of our corporate and ad agency clients and 90% were on T1 or symetrical DSL and didn't see any delay at all. The load in was

seamless to them. The link to the older html site is now live as well. Thanks for all the on and offline responses. We are now live at www.kirktuck.com

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Thank you. Kirk

<I>T1 or symetrical DSL and didn't see any delay at all</I><P>

There's more to this than just how fast potential client's

machines are. For instance, unless you are using AKAMAI

to distribute your content then the bigger your files the more you'll

clog <B>your</B> server.<P>

The way you currently have it, every user has to download over 1

MB of binaries before they can see anything. That's a lot of

uneccessary bandwidth traffic on your side which can indeed

also slow users down if too many of them try to access your site

at the same time.<P>

(Why do you think high traffic sites like yahoo or apple have such

simple page designs? It isn't only because of a concern for the

dail-in crowd!)

Andrew, Your point is well taken but in fact each folder is around 500K. The site is running much, much faster now than when I posted the beta request.

Please give it one more try. Thank you for taking the time.