Hello,
I have been playing with a new web site template. Curious what your thoughts are, the music is optional and can be shut off using the speaker icon at the bottom right. Thank you in advance from any feedback. www.allstarimaging.com
I love the template - I'm not meaning to be overly critical, but here are some technical things that i would take care of:
hmm, there's quite a bit of aliasing (jagged lines) on your pictures when viewed at smaller sizes
looking a bit more into it, it seems like the problem is that you're having the user's web browser download the full size picture file and then have the browser use it's internal resizer (of bad quality, because it is probably optimized for speed) to resize the image
this is apparent when i click on the "contact us" and "your images" links or when i look at specific photos in your porfolio
resizing the images yourself in photoshop or writing some PHP code for imageready would do the trick =] - here's why you should do it
1. just like i mentioned, the browser's resizer is terrible so you get a lot of that aliasing and jaggies in your portfolio
2. the load time on anyone without a dsl connection is probably way too long - you have them download the 2048x1360 pixel picture and then have their browser resize it to 497x312 - doing the math, they are downloading almost 18 times the data they need and so their load time will be about 18 times slower than in needs to be - the picture in question is a 1.9mb download which will take someone on 56k about 5 minutes to download and even for dsl users will take 9-30 seconds to load a single image
3. by not resizing your pictures beforehand, anyone can grab your full size images and make hi-resolution prints!
end point: just resize your pictures beforehand =]
Overall, great website - you've got some amazing shots and I'm sure your clients will be impressed!
Jack, it's a very nice layout and your images are very good also. I like the fact that your main page doesn't require any scrolling to see everything and it's not "busy" with a lot of clutter.
There appears to be something going on with (I believe) the compression of the images because they have jagged edges. I almost seems like there is a full size image shrunk down to fit in a space that's like 600x450 pixels. I'm no expert and I used to have this happen until I looked to see what the cell size was where I was putting the image and resized the image to that....eg. if the cell size was 530x425, that what size I made the image. Others may do it differently. I'm attaching a like from my site as an example http://franklauriphotography.com/
Also, this is just a thing with me but the music doesn't do it for me.
Nice work! Clean, professional and easy to get around.
I am in the exact same boat. I've been using SmugMug for the past couple of years. I've been very pleased with them sans one big problem. They seem to not be all that interested in addressing a consistent complaint from pro's regarding the issue of package pricing and discount coupons which I am in desperate need of.
I've done a trial version with a couple of website builder (Sitewelder, Zenfolio) outfits and have a couple of questions for you.
Did you do this whole site through Printroom or just the back end? If you used different vendors, would you mind sharing who you used for each? Also, how do you tie the two together. Yours looks seemless.
Thanks.
Donnie
Edited by DL Cunningham on Mar 30, 2008 at 02:00 PM GMT
Hello Jeffrey and Frank,
Thank you for the feedback regarding the image sizing. That's why I posted here for your comments. You are correct in that on my initial run with this I have used full size images and based on your feedback I will work on the resizing. Regarding the music, I agree it's hit or miss but hopefully for those who miss will figure out how to turn it off with the speaker icon. I think once I resize they will "flash quicker" and the area where I live the majority of the population is on high speed service. Thanks again and Frank I like your site. Nice and clean. I use zenfolio as well for some display and back up storage (www.allstarimaging.zenfolio.com) Thank you
Jack
Please ditch the music. Think of your web site as the end user sees it. He or she is sitting at their computer, listening to iTunes or other music and they hit your site and are forced to hear your music blasting out their speakers. There is absolutley NO benefit to music on a web site and it only annoys users and ties up their speakers and bandwidth.
Thanks for the response. I'm in the process of designing my website through Sitewelder as we speak. I've been pretty impressed by them so far. I signed up for their 30 day trial last Wed night and had an operational website in about 1 hour, although not much in it yet. I actually got a call Friday from a SW rep to see how it was going so far. Pretty impressive these days.
How do you go about linking your SW website to your backend service at Printroom? And how did you make it look so seamless. One would hardly know they are from two different services.
Hi Donnie,
Regarding the link to printroom, once you have the sitewelder template ready you can call sitewelder support and they will create the link for you. On the printroom end. They have 2 storefront options, a Flash site or a HTML site, I used the HTML site for that. If you have anymore questions let me know or email me, good luck.
To the other posters, thank you for your input. On my mac the images looked "ok". However when I looked at them on my laptop for the first time they did look "jaggy". I will resize them in the next few days. On the music front, it seems to be hit or miss. I think I'm going with the music for now and if the visitors don't like it they can turn it off on the speaker icon. Thank you again to all.
Jack
