Itlooks very nice to me. It loads quickly on my wireless notebook connected to cable modem. The layout is very nice. I don't see anything quirky at all. Good job!
Load time for me was about 20 seconds until the first picture was on my screen. Not really that bad, considering you told the user what was going on with the progress bar.
The interface wasn't quirky at all - In fact I really liked it. And your photography was superb! ;)
Since you are using Flash (I assume you did this yourself?), there are one or two pointers that might help the overall appearance.
- Serifed fonts (the ones with little flares on the ends, like Times New Roman or Courier) are not Flash friendly. Your best bet is to learn about "pixel fonts". Here's a great website with a few freebies, Fonts for Flash.
- Flash does not handle image scaling very well. Make sure the JPEG you use in the movie clips is the exact same dimensions as the movie clip itself...avoid trying to cram a 480x360 image in to a 400x320 movie clip. It just never looks right.
I don't know,I got to about fifteen seconds and gave up.
Sorry, I know that this is typical of the fickle and impatient culture of today, but I really don't think there's any excuse for load times that long for anything that's not video.
I visit hundreds of photo sites a month and all of them load faster, some use flash and many don't and most of them look just great even with very low bandwidth usage. I think you should think very carefully about every little bit of bandwidth that you want the client to have to use before he can get to your photos. If you feel your site justifies it, then fair enough.
Loaded pretty quickly for me and I really like the layout. Some of the photos have horrible compression problems. It's quite obvious on the first shot in Headshots.
I don't think 15 seconds is all that bad...or is it? 20 seconds seems long depending on your connection but I assume things are slow in general for those who took that long to see the site.
And yeah, I need to find and resize a few of the images to avoid jaggies but otherwise...anyone else wish to chime in?
I didn't measure the time, but it seemed like a not-too-long wait for me, certainly faster than many photo sites I've seen. The images are beautiful, and the interface seemed easy & intuitive. Congrats!
And yeah, I need to find and resize a few of the images to avoid jaggies but otherwise...anyone else wish to chime in?
It does annoy me a bit that your background color when the site first loads is that blue/green. If your background image isn't going to load immediately, the color should more closely match so there's not a jarring color change. The color should at the very least match the blue you use once the site loads. Right now it seems much greener.
