We are about to launch our new website at the end of the week. Until then, I am trying to finalize some page elements and functional issues.

We would love to receive feedback from other photographers on what they think! A worry of mine has been load times, since all of the computers that I access the web from all have an extremely fast connection. Following along with my fears, another fellow FMer had just mentioned that they were experiencing some slow down with it too.

Please critique and provide some feedback if you have a free moment.

Thanks!

http://www.southernreflectionsstudio.com/newsite/

I love the look. It kept me there, in spite of the wait times. But the gallery... I didn't make it past the first picture. It took so long to get there and then the load time for each photo was excruciatingly long. When I realized I'd have to wait that between each photo I bailed. I thought the notebook about the two of you was really cute. I enjoyed that. It gave me just enough insight into each of you. I'd like the blog to feel more like it was part of the website.

I don't generally care for flash. JMHO though. I know lots of photogs use it.

Loaded great for me about half a sec between images only thing I notice is in the galleries the picture scroll wheel on the right is really sensitive not sure if you can control that though.

I would have to mirror what was said above.

like the look, like the notebook, but the images load very very very slow. I can't speak for anyone else but I would NOT stick around waiting for images that move that slow.

If it's a custom site I'd ask the designer to implement a preloader so that once a slide slips off the next one can be immediately (or nearly immediately) served.

Also I coudln't find where to turn off the music. I'm not going to say you shouldn't have music, but I think you should give your clients the option to turn it off.

Oh this is a T1 line in Florida... not a 28.8k modem

From a very fast computer with fast internet in Minnesota, I can tell you it loads fast and robustly. It feels very snappy and quick. I'll try tonight from my 3G connection.

I like it. Probably one of the nicest sites I've seen lately. Is it a template or is that from scratch?

The first time I tried to load the Wedding Gallery page it crashed Safari on my Macbook Pro. Second time it didn't load the page and told me there were 82 errors trying to load. Third time it loaded after 10 seconds.

After that, the gallery was fine. For me, the 1 second between slides is annoying, but customers might be willing to wait for the higher quality images you can show.

I'm on a fairly fast DSL line. Strange that some say it is snappy and others say it is very very very slow. That's a very strange dichotomy. I wonder what woud be behind that...

Thanks everybody.

The site was originally a shell template I bought from ActiveDen. I took it apart and stripped out the core index and xml to make it into our own. The whole look and style was recreated and put together by my wife and I.

I just realized another dilemma that may explain why some people are able to access it quickly, while others are seeing slowdown issues. The site is piggybacked off of another website server that I maintain. I just checked the other website that is also hosted on that server (goDaddy) and it was reacting very slowly...and it's just a standard HTML page. So I now wonder...am I facing a server issue, or a flash file issue?

I will have to work on getting the photo gallery to preload the images better regardless...if it isn't already trying to do it in some way. Obviously, that's one of the most important areas of the site.

Thanks again!

It is incredibly slow for me. Also I have to say that I hate it when a site automatically plays music at me. People at work may go to your site and have the music blast out....

Looks very nice though although I have made my hatred for flash based sites well known so I will not go into the vast amount of reasons on why it is such a bad idea.

I would certainly recommend turning off the music though.

Do you have the licence to use that song?

Other people replied already, but it's loading pretty slow off the t1 at my office. Definitely work on the preloader, it doesn't seem very efficient.

BTW - I was just thinking about a usability issue as well. Even if you get the preloader working better, I'm not sure how useful it will be when paired up with the scrolling picture index on the side. I noticed that when I went to the galleries I naturally rested my mouse near the gallery index which caused it to scroll almost as soon as I hit the page. The first image I hit on the sidebar was one of the last because it had already scrolled quite a bit. Even if you do fix the preloader some users may be trying to view the last image anyways which has probably not even been loaded. It seems to me you may want to put up and down buttons there and make it move onClick instead of the mouseover event it's using now...

ken

And here in Portugal it loads quite fast. It's true that i'm on a pretty fast connection but it takes just a couple of seconds to load each picture.

Wasn't slow for me at all and I'm just on DSL ATM. You have to watch slow opinions from outside the US this time of day. Lots of things are slow from about 10-2pm EST. There's another forum on a server in Europe that I frequent and this time of day it slows to a crawl every day. So, I don't think it's flash at all. Most likely just connections at this time.

My site's also on GoDaddy and I'm not thrilled with performance at all. I don't know if it's quite at the "pathetic" level but I'm not very happy. Thankfully the preloader on the slideshow does it's loading while the previous image is still displayed, so at least when the slideshow slows down the visitor is still seeing a photo and probably won't mind as much.

I think I can fix the autoscroll in the galleries without a problem. The speed that it uses to scroll should be adjusted fairly easily by changing the formula. I agree that I'd rather have a crawling speed than something as fast as it is.

It was behaving slowly for me this morning...on the same computer that I've always used to view it. It has to do more with connection than the site itself. The main index is only a minute amount of kb's and the background images are no more than 2-300kb each. I'll have to search deeper to see if I can find the issue. I do have access to other servers, so I'll see if I can drop it onto there and witness any better performance.

As for music - what do the rest of you prefer? Music autoplays or not? BTW - The music toggle is in the upper-right hand corner. You click and it opens the controls for you. Granted we haven't purchased the license to play music yet, but we also haven't figured out what songs we're sticking to yet either.

I should clarify that when I said it was slow I was referring specifically to the gallery, the rest of the site was moving around fast enough for me (you should see how freggin' slow my site is on GoDaddy ... btw, what kind of hosting plan do you have with them?)

As far as music is concerned, what we prefer has little meaning. I think most clients DO enjoy listening to music while looking at slideshows so I'd probably opt for music (though you can check out Tony Hoffer's site and last time I checked he had no music and doesn't seem to be losing too much business over it). If anything I'd run the song through audacity and build a very gradual volume increase so that the visitor hears the music starting to play softly, in time to turn it off if their viewing environment is such that having music blast would be an embarassment.

Fading the songs in is a good idea...hadn't thought about that. That might make both types of people happy.

I don't quite remember what plan we use with GoDaddy...but its not small. The server hosts our church website, which probably only sees about 35-40 visits a days.

drawin2 wrote:
Fading the songs in is a good idea...hadn't thought about that. That might make both types of people happy.

I don't quite remember what plan we use with GoDaddy...but its not small. The server hosts our church website, which probably only sees about 35-40 visits a days.

Oh so it's a dedicated server plan? That would explain why your site loads way faster than mine (then again... mine uses wordpress to drive the whole thing and that's notoriously slow on GoDaddy)

Wasn't slow for me at all~ and I love it!!! Really cute idea

Ok...I just checked. It's actually not a dedicated server. But...I agree that our blog (which uses Wordpress) is a bit slower at times than the html church site.