DJoy Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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I think the pictures are excellent, some are a little too processed for my personal tastes but I still enjoy them nonetheless, my personal favourite is of Jenny M. on the boards in the main gallery, which I think is quite wonderful.
In terms of constructive criticism I hope Mr Hill and his web-designer will accept the following in the spirit in which it is given. The great photography and image processing skills shown are let down by some poor technology choices with regards the new website, and I feel his talents deserve a better chance to be seen.
The website author has chosen to implement a proprietary technology, namely Flash for the main guts of the page, seemingly purely to achieve the effect of a simple gallery with images fading in and out. The result of this is that those lovely high res images do not appear to be cached by the browser, and so each time you navigate away from a gallery and come back, it reloads the entire image set again from scratch. On the main gallery page there are some 35 images loaded...
The effect of this is that it appears to be creating huge load on the webserver and the site is quite unresponsive, and on many occasions will not fully load at all, even if left for a couple of hours! I imagine the increased bandwidth costs from this method will also be significantly higher.
There appears to be no real reason to use Flash on this site as the same effects created would be easily achievable in Javascript and would ensure the images were cached by the browser. Not using flash would also allow the site to be viewed by people using platforms where Flash is not available.
I'm afraid this appears to be an occasion where technology has been used purely for the sake of using it, and in this case it is causing a detrimental effect on the site experience and excluding some potential viewers. By using more standard tools you could make this website, it would look absolutely identical, and operate faster, reduce bandwidth needs and provide a better user experience.
I hope that's constructive and you perceive it as well meant, as it was. The images were a pleasure to look at, but the process of looking at them was painful.
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