Feedback on my website

[Angie]

Hello All!
If anyone has time, I would really appreciate some feedback on my website. The address is www.SCPhoto.ca

I work at a photography studio, so naturally the site is full of pictures. Of course they take a bit to load. I've tried making them smaller, or a slightly lower quality, but especially being a Photography studio, we want the pictures to look their best on the website. And I find that they're already at the limit.

I played around with Flash for a while, and decided to make this website with Flash. Thing is, I'm not very good with loading times, internet flow etc. As it stands right now, I'm not sure how long things take to load for the average user. So some feedback on this, along with what connection speed you're using, would really be appreciated.

Also, if you can let me know; were you interested enough to look deeper into the site? What held your interest? Was it easy to navigate? Was anything incomplete/broken?

We have a section on the site for customers to look at their Sitting Proofs. The section is "Your Pictures" and I have a sample sitting in there if anyone would like to try that. The Username is: 08272004 Password: AJRZQWKZ

On a side note - we use Adobe Photoshop 7 to automate each sitting into a Website Photo Gallery. The only issue I'm having as of now, is how to trap the enter key as the login in JavaScript. Right now if you hit the enter key, it just refreshes the page. :?

Personally I like the way the site looks, but I really want to make sure it works well for every user.

So, any suggestions for modifications or complete overhauls? :)

Thanks for your time!
~Angie

[Angie]

Hello Proteus!
After I posted that, I figured I should have posted about the goal of the site! Sorry about that.

The goal is mainly to attract local customers. People from Southern Alberta/Saskatchewan. So no, search engine hits aren't what we're aiming for.

Honestly, when it comes down to it. The site is pretty much used for the customer to share their pictures with friends and family who live out of town. That way a grad student's sister attending university in New York can see the pictures, and decide what poses she likes, and so forth.

The second most frequently used part of the website are the price lists. If someone an hour out of town would like a pricelist, they can print off a PDF instead of taking a day trip here.

I think my over all concern is making sure friends and family of our customers can view the website without error. As well as showcasing some of our work.

[webado]

PS. I should start accepting donations right? :wink:

I'm afraid you're right :wink:

Seriously, you've got a flair for layout and composition. Many, I especially, could learn lots from you.

[trackerm]

It took 4 minutes to load the little flash photos (banner?) on your main page using dial up.
By that time normal people would have given up.

Can’t ‘centre click’ to open in a new window of a multi tabbed browser, so the next page I load (off the menu bar) 'Children' takes a while to load too. But I must say the photos are beautiful!! You obviously have a talent for photography!
Waiting for the next page to load.
Tee dee dee dum tee dee
Still loading..
Hum that song again…
Great photos again… can’t click on them to increase the size.. but is this because you don’t want people to be able to copy the photos?

Great buttons.

I use Gallery Constructor 2 for my pics. OK this is a difficult program to use as it runs off a java run time thingo (like The Gimp) its complicated like old fashioned programs that are not user friendly (in Gimp its taken me 30 mins to find My Documents in the ‘Open’ dialogue box!)….. But my pics pages opens at the speed of a startled gazelle, the thumbnails are about half the size of your largest and can be clicked to full size.

The wedding photos are beautiful… I must find a girlfriend.

Unlike Proteus, I don’t mind a black background. For less experienced web builders it can look better than palette colours. But I love his ideas on his page example he has done for you.

Was at a party where they made the Pinata too strong and it took us an hour with baseball bats to open the damn thing! :) Mexicans must have a better hitting technique.

Mark

[webado]

Was at a party where they made the Pinata too strong and it took us an hour with baseball bats to open the damn thing! :) Mexicans must have a better hitting technique.
Mark
LOL! I remember having a lovely pinata for my daughter's birthday when she was maybe around 6-7 years old. The kids took to hitting the blasted thing so hard, it really was frightening to see so much violence and destruction in the little ones. I suppose that pinata was built too strong as well (bought it at Toys'R Us - maybe they need them to be strong so they don't break in transit).

Angie's main page loaded in an instant for me, but then I am on a fast connection. The other pages with the photos loaded in less than a second each.

I'm wondering, why do I have to go to that intermediate page and click again before getting to the one where I get to see my proofs?


Oh, and I think the reason why your page refreshes on hitting the enter key is that you are using onClick instead of onSubmit event handler for your login.

If you define that button like this:


<input type=button value=" Login " onSubmit="check(this.form)" name="Button">


it might just work (but I've not tried it :? )

[Angie]

Thanks for all the advice Proteus, I really appreciate your time and knowledge!

Can I ask to what length you had to go to grab a picture off the site? Did you have to print screen? Or was there an alternate way? As you can imagine, it's a huge concern for us to have people grabbing their pictures off the site, and printing their own prints. 100K isn't much to print with, but it's still a concern. For the gallery we actually run each HTML page through a protector, to block ways of saving the file. Which seems to work well. As for using a watermark, I've considered it. But being pretty new to the whole website design process, I'm not sure of a program to do it with. Using Adobe Photoshop 7 to create the galleries, doesn't give me much play that way. There's a similar option, but no 'watermark' or 'transparency', only solid text. Which is statically placed. So on some prints it covers your face, etc. Which wouldn't go over well.

When you say only 613x287 is being used, is that the entire page? Or what browser are you using? One without toolbars? I use 1024x768 as well. I've been trying to keep away from scrolling pages. With past websites, I've found that visitors miss things because they don't scroll. I've been using Dreamweaver to create the HTML pages, and so far it's been a bear trying to have each page run centered. It seems to choke with Flash file alignment. I'll have to work on that though, because I completely see your point there. It almost looks incomplete with the excess black space.

I had the issue with the gallery pictures before as well. My trouble is trying to keep the page from scrolling, I end up with quite a narrow box for the galleries. If I only had one vertical picture per page, there would be quite a bit of white space on the sides. Where as with the horizontal pictures, they fit a little more snug. So I'm not sure what to do there. :?

Can I also ask how long the pages took to load for you? And what connection speed you have?

As for more detailed recommendations, constructive critisism is by no means a sore spot with me!

Again, I really appreciate your help!
Thanks!
~Angie

[Angie]

Hi there Mark!
Thanks for the input! But 4 minutes on dial-up is not what I wanted to hear! Being from a small city, we get a lot of customers from the 'outskirts' and it's assumed they're on dial-up. (There just in the process of stringing up high speed out in the boonies around here)


Great photos again… can’t click on them to increase the size.. but is this because you don’t want people to be able to copy the photos?


Absolutely. It's far from profitable for us if people can grab and print their own order. :)

Haha, Gallery Constructor 2 doesn't sound like much fun. If you have a chance, you should try Adobe Photoshop 7's Automated Gallery. It's simple as pie, and although limited, there are quite a few options.

Can’t ‘centre click’ to open in a new window of a multi tabbed browser, so the next page I load (off the menu bar) 'Children' takes a while to load too.
Can you explain that a little further? What browser are you using? It sounds like your 'center click' is my 'right click'. In which case you couldn't open a 2nd browser, because the buttons are part of the flash file as well. And flash, as far as I know doesn't support that function. I'll have to look into that as well.

But I must say the photos are beautiful!! You obviously have a talent for photography!
Well thanks! I'm actually not the photographer, I work behind the scenes on the computer; Processing orders, digital imaging, database managment, the website, etc. But I'll most definately pass the compliment along!! It's always great to hear. =D

I think my 10th birthday was the last time I had a swing at a pinata. So about 12 years ago! I may have to get one, just for the fun of it. :D

[Angie]

Hi Chrisooc!
I was so excited about the onSubmit suggestion, but that didn't work either. :( At the same time, I thought - maybe it needs to be in the same frame as the password box - (for direction) but that failed as well. It's quite frustrating, I have searched online, but there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut answer.

I'm wondering, why do I have to go to that intermediate page and click again before getting to the one where I get to see my proofs?
I was waiting for that question to come up! It's a little confusing. And I've also been trying to figure out a way around that annoying page. But here goes... We assign people a username and a password. If I were to simply use those as list options on the login page, people could check the source, and have everyone's username and password. Keeping people's pictures private and secure is also an issue. So I'm using a JavaScript to encode those 2 bits of information. For example: The option value of the sample gallery you saw is -
<option value='08272004|16682|CLRGZANF'>08272004
The remaining javascript on the login page decodes that password, and directs the user to the same 8 characterpassword.html page. (that intermediate page) and then on to their gallery.

Trouble is Photoshop 7 puts an index.html page in each image folder, to 'index' the gallery. Which means I would have to pass through AJRZQWKZ/index.html, but because of the encode/decode script, I'm limited to passing 8 characters. I know a little bit of javascript, but for the most part I'm lost with that script. For the life of me, I can't get it to accept more than 8 characters. So there's where the intermediate page came in.

I'm almost positive the above makes no sense, because even I'm confused when I re-read it. I'm on a constant hunt for a better way, but the script I'm using now, is the most secure one I've had. So I'd rather chalk up the intermediate page for now. :(

On another note, I'm glad to hear the pages loaded so quickly for you! Thanks for the feedback, and if you have any other suggestions on trapping the enter key for the login, send em my way!!

Thanks!
~Angie

[webado]

Sorry Angie! I missed a couple more things:

1) for the <form> tag you could rewrite it like this:


<FORM name=login onSubmit="return check(login)" >


And where you have the Login button:


<INPUT type="submit" value=" Login " name="Button" >


I tried testing this myself but I hit a brick wall with Access denied - so maybe it would work on your web site (sicne I obviously don't have whatever else your scripts needed for the login).

I hope you made a copy of your original login page in case this one gets messed up royally LOL!

Sorry if I sent you down the wrong path. :oops:

[trackerm]

Can you explain that a little further? What browser are you using? It sounds like your 'center click' is my 'right click'.


I use MyIE2 a tabbed browser that works with Internet Explorer. Using tabbed browsers let people using dialup load up to 100 pages at a time. So if I see 10 photos I can click them with the centre button of my mouse and a new tab will open and start loading the links. So I could centre click each of your menu buttons and load all the pages of your website. While they are loading I could be reading some other website. This is especially good for Google as I can click on results as I read through the search page. By the time I am finished the first of the web pages has loaded.

I don’t know what its like in the USA, but here in Australia theres a million TV ads for high speed cable connections, but they are so expensive that more than 90% of normal people use dial-up. This will change in a few years, but at the moment we have many people who design their pages on cable and use things like Flash which makes it hard going on dial up.
Stats I found “July [2004] measurements from Nielsen/NetRatings placed the broadband audience at 51 per cent of the US online population at home, up from 38 per cent a year ago.”
“Ovum currently estimates that broadband connections make-up 20 percent of the 4.3 million Internet connections currently used by Australian consumers each year.” But 45% of those broadband connections are businesses.
So I guess you need to know what your customers use.


I think flash users should be all be shot :) and people using flash intro pages should be shot twice, but I can understand that you need special things to stop your photos being downloaded so Flash and watermarks may be the best option.

All the best

Mark

[Angie]

Hi Chrisooc!
That just shows how much I know about javascript. :oops:
I should have known there would be a couple places to change it.

I'm at home now, but when I get back to work I'll definately give it a try. Thank you so much for all your help! If this works, I'll definately owe you one!

Thanks!

[webado]

Oh, I only hoep it works. Like I said, I couldn't test it too well. But if it doesn't work, I will suggest another way to rewrite your form which should work.

[lucy]

hello Angie, your site is great, you are gifted for design, color balance and communicating feelings through image.

At a 125 speed, I waited almost 2 minutes for the entering page to load. But at 20 seconds the baby foto appeared, it was so nice that I decided to wait. The remaining pages loaded more rapidly. Everything works fine for me, and there are good photos at all sections.

As for load delay, may be you can put a (slow) autoscrolling text at right, so while visitor is waiting he may be reading some interesting writing you can insert on photography, your offer, or a story of a photograph ...

Have a nice day.
Lucy

[robinev]

Being from a small city, we get a lot of customers from the 'outskirts' and it's assumed they're on dial-up.

And that seems to be the important issue. If most of your users are likely to be on dialup, then the site should be designed for dialup.

But if you're marketing to an area with a high penetration of high-speed connections, then it may be worthwhile to cater more to those users. I manage a site that is, by now, slow to load for dialup users. The site has been active for nine years, and even four of five years ago when it was designed to load more quickly, I noticed that most of the visitors were calling us up from work computers with fast connections. That still happens, but now the majority of visitors come in on cable or dsl connections.

Part of that is self-selecting. A dialup user who has to wait and wait for the pages to load probably isn't going to return whereas a high-speed user may find the page more interesting because of its overabundance of graphics (which I should convert to Flash one of these days).

So I try to find a balance. I know it's slow on dialup, but at least it loads the primary content area before calling up all the "stuff". I do, however, cater more to high-speed users. And that seems to work when we're selling tickets.

So it depends partly on who you expect your visitors to be.

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[Angie]

Chrisooc,
Hi! I tried that alteration, and it didn't work either. As a matter of fact, I didn't realize the first code-change made it so the login button was completely inactive. I didn't notice that until the next day. Any other suggestions? If not that's ok. It's a bear I've been battling for a little while. I sincerely appreciate all your help!

~Angie

[Angie]

Mark,
I've never heard of MyIE2. I'll have to look into that!

I think flash users should be all be shot and people using flash intro pages should be shot twice, but ...

Haha. I don't blame you. I never realized so many Australlian users were on dial-up.

Thanks for the facts!
~Angie

[Angie]

Thanks Lucy & robinev for your finds and suggestions!
I know we do get quite a few customers from the outskirts, but I still think the majority of visitors are local, and I'm assuming high-speed. It's too bad StatCounter doesn't have a Connection stat. Maybe I should look in to polling the visitors on their connection. Then I would know what the current majority is.

Thanks again!
~Angie