Rejiggered my homepage, opinions?

Nice and simple, but I have abit of an issue with having to scroll up and down the page every time i click a thumbnail... my screen res is 1440x900 and if I can't get a picture + thumbs visible at the same time.
 
King4aDay said:
Nice and simple, but I have abit of an issue with having to scroll up and down the page every time i click a thumbnail... my screen res is 1440x900 and if I can't get a picture + thumbs visible at the same time.
Click to expand...

Same and im using a 1920x1200 res screen. Also the frontpage has to load far too much content to start off. Before the first picture showed, it had to load up 8.1Mb. Are the thumbnails the full sized images?
 
Messiah Khan said:
Same and im using a 1920x1200 res screen. Also the frontpage has to load far too much content to start off. Before the first picture showed, it had to load up 8.1Mb. Are the thumbnails the full sized images?
Click to expand...

It preloads the image so that when you click the thumb its an instant show, have made the first pic the first in the list to remedy this.

Also added some browser detection, fading is nasty on IE! Have to fix the thumbs glow in IE too, IE is just awful...

As for the navigation being low, the problem is with the nav at the side it just looked... bad :/ Nav at the top and you still have to scroll... Theres nowhere convenient unless its in a single long line... which you'd then have to scroll sideways, or only have 8 or so pics on your site, or make the actual picture too small to even be worthwhile! Any suggestions?
There is a next and prev button though, which should fit onto smaller screens, I've tested on a 17" as my minimum, 15" is very restrictive. Will consider the 19" wides though...

Many thanks for pointing these things out! :)

Edit: Have removed all the swanky effects from IE, it's just jerky and poop. FF rules! :)
 
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Visually appealing, but here are some constructive criticisms;


  • Using full size images for thumbs is a bad idea. You should load the thumbs, and either load the full images on the fly (when requested) or in a separate preloading entity.
  • It is bad usability design to force the user to scroll down to pick an image, and scroll up to see it; this is a really bad mistake, and spoils the effect of what would be a fairly nice lightbox site.
  • Talking of lightbox, I suggest instead of showing the full size image inline, you have them appear as and when needed in a lightbox-style floating DIV element.
  • Also, you specify in the page schema that it is Strict HTML, when it doesn't seem to be (EDIT: I ran it through the validator, it isn't valid).
  • Fade effect is nice, but seems fairly inefficient - maxes out my Firefox thread just by waving my mouse over all the images. I guess this is down to using jQuery?
  • Your title is an image, when it doesn't need to be. There is hardly any text on the site that says who you are and what the theme of the page is. If you're not looking for search engine traffic, this isn't much of a problem.
  • You declare a <div class="info"> without terminating at the end, causing content overflow problems in Safari and Firefox 1.5.
  • The text at the bottom is composed of really poor English.
 
JimpsEd said:
Visually appealing, but here are some constructive criticisms;


  • Using full size images for thumbs is a bad idea. You should load the thumbs, and either load the full images on the fly (when requested) or in a separate preloading entity.
    So instead of pre-loading when you create the thumbs (which lets the user know its ready) you preload seperately... I don't see a benefit or reason? Furthermore, thats built into the tool and would require more than my puny brain to compute! :D

  • It is bad usability design to force the user to scroll down to pick an image, and scroll up to see it; this is a really bad mistake, and spoils the effect of what would be a fairly nice lightbox site.
    I may have another play with lightbox, but I do prefer swinging my mouse around the nav on this one. I'd rather make the nav fit on the screen, will have a think

  • Talking of lightbox, I suggest instead of showing the full size image inline, you have them appear as and when needed in a lightbox-style floating DIV element.
    Perhaps some combination of the nav from this that I like and lightbox image display... hmmm, this could be a good idea actually... cheers, now im going to lose more sleep playing :D

  • Also, you specify in the page schema that it is Strict HTML, when it doesn't seem to be (EDIT: I ran it through the validator, it isn't valid).
    Validation is on the todo list but thank you for the reminder, its pointless before its been tested and finalised though, which is what this thread is for :)

  • Fade effect is nice, but seems fairly inefficient - maxes out my Firefox thread just by waving my mouse over all the images. I guess this is down to using jQuery?
    Why shouldn't it use the processing power you have? I would guess that if you are mousing around the nav then you probably aren't in the middle of an intensive game of supreme commander ;) In testing this doesnt use much power on my not-very-powerful pc and doesnt slowdown or anything even with PS open, media playing, WOW minimised and several other things chewing on system resources.

  • Your title is an image, when it doesn't need to be. There is hardly any text on the site that says who you are and what the theme of the page is. If you're not looking for search engine traffic, this isn't much of a problem.
    Meta info and the like comes under the same "tbd" as validation, its not really needed yet.

  • You declare a <div class="info"> without terminating at the end, causing content overflow problems in Safari and Firefox 1.5.
    Cheers :)

  • The text at the bottom is composed of really poor English.
    huh? slight over use of commas, hehe, but other than that what's "really bad" about my Engrish?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tear-apart :p I think you've given me an idea that I quite like... but I'll play tomorrow, too darn tired now!
 
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Helium_Junkie said:
What browser do you use? And version if you dont mind :)
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Latest version of Opera on a fairly low spec XP laptop. though it's only used for browsing and doesn't often have any problems with slowing down, I will head off and have a look on the desktop which a much better spec and also has latest opera.:)

edit: seems fine on the desktop, so perhaps just the laptop can't cope?
 
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As far as the English goes:

your site said:
TiltedSky are Matt Bartlett and Claire Davey, photography and photomanipulation enthusiasts.
Find us on DeviantArt, or visit our gallery to see more of our work.
If you have enjoyed viewing any of our photos, please e-mail us your comments, we'd be delighted to hear from you.
Click to expand...

I would be inclined to word it like this:

TitledSky is a photography and photo-manipulation project by Matt Bartlett and Claire Davey. To see more of our work visit our gallery or find us on DeviantArt. If you have enjoyed viewing any of our photos then please e-mail us with your comments. We would be delighted to hear from you.

I realise it's mostly just semantics, a bit of re-wording and grammatical alteration but the original doesn't read all that well.

Panzer
 
Panzerbjorn said:
As far as the English goes:

TiltedSky are Matt Bartlett and Claire Davey
Click to expand...

There's nothing wrong with that.
Thanks for the suggestions though :) I'll rethink the wording after the image/nav is all sorted so that at least one person likes it :p

Anyone know a script that does the same thing as the current nav with the fading in and out, that is seperate to the actual image display?
 
Thumb nails dont line up with the overly large title picture.

Title of web site not standing out.

reason/discription of web site not clear from the begining.

Other than them little issues, good pics and easy to navagate.

Have to agree with others though, hate having to scroll up and down, should try a menu bar along the top and let the user decide where they want to go.


** Using full size images for thumbs is a bad idea. You should load the thumbs, and either load the full images on the fly (when requested) or in a separate preloading entity.
So instead of pre-loading when you create the thumbs (which lets the user know its ready) you preload seperately... I don't see a benefit or reason? Furthermore, thats built into the tool and would require more than my puny brain to compute! **

Reason for not using the large image as a thumb is to lower the time it takes for the web page to load up. less size = faster loading. Let them open the image on another window when they click on it so they know its loading up.

<ColiN> - good effort though.
 
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I would make it crop the thumbnails so that, regardless of the aspect ratio of the original pic, it always fills the thumbnail area.

Piclens support would be awesome, so if you could add an MRSS feed that'd be great.
 
colinuk said:
Reason for not using the large image as a thumb is to lower the time it takes for the web page to load up. less size = faster loading. Let them open the image on another window when they click on it so they know its loading up.
Click to expand...

I really quite like the pre-loading though, and with todays interweb it doesn't take that long, but everyone here seems to hate it! :p Perhaps I'll reconsider then. I don't know how I'd make it buffer the full size images after loading all the thumbs :S this is getting out of hand :D
 
I think it will work if you bring your title close to the image at the top, and make it more obvious that you just click the image for the next one, then it becomes a simple gallery and you can ignore the bottom bit all together.
 
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