Thread: up for review

www.cgmulleralgarve.com

Hi everybody,
please critique my site, did some changes, there seems to be something not quite right with the form in contacts, I read the tut's on forms and how to edit and link it, it was working at some time, than I added the reset button, and than it stopped sending emails. Then I noticed, even so I used my own email as a sender, yahoo put it in the spam folder?
and not quite sure which format to use for jpegs, would like to display as HQ as possible and quick, yet don't want to over do on page weight.

thanks in advance

Only thing I noticed is on the Contact page, some of the text overlaps (I use Firefox, I think this has been a problem with other sites on that browser). Otherwise, nice site!

Hi Electriclutist,

thank you for your review, I originally had 1 text box and links as an overlay, I separated the text, let me know if that fixed it for firefox, or maybe you have some recommendation, of how I can prevent it from happening for firefox users.

www.cgmulleralgarve.com

Site is clean and easy to read.

Here is the right way of writing your text in Portuguese to say that your page is still under construction:

Desculpe, mas não falo bem português.
Esta página ainda está em construção.


Cheers,

Hi nzbr,
I appreciate the translation. This language is not easy
to learn for me. But I try.
thanks for your time

No, it's not easy!

Not a problem!!
Cheers,

Great site (I think) unfortunately your images take so long to download (even the small ones) that I've had to give up. Great homepage though.

Ditto with Muzza. http://cgmulleralgarve.com/projectstudy.html is at 1600kb & could easily be 200kb if you use soothing else to show your images.
Remember these images will be in your cache and will appear to load fast as they don't have to down load again..

Hi Muzza and Chris,
thanks a lot for checking my site.
I agree with the size issue, but here is my problem. I really would like some good quality and size at the same time I would like reduced loading time of course. Did some looking around and I found Chris's comparison test:

quote:

BV LIGHT BOX.
http://www.collectors-info.com/testing/lbtest.html

BV GALLERY
http://www.collectors-info.com/testing/galtest.html

This one is a photo album that a few on the forum use.
http://www.collectors-info.com/testi...nightswim.html




The last one is from this company (FREE)
http://www.ornj.net/webalbum/

quote end

1. I don't know why, but if I look at your light box it loads slower, yes, but it displays a bigger picture in new window, but it doesn't stay in a box to go to the next?

2. The gallery loads fast and the pop-up window displays the same thumbnail size as the folder, in fact the picture in the gallery is larger than the one in the pop-up, so it does not do anything for the individual picture.
http://www.collectors-info.com/testing/tn_012.png is 22k in the gallery
http://www.collectors-info.com/testing/012.jpg is 4.7k in the pop-up with the same pix size

3. I like, but I am not sure if it would be suitable for technical stuff?

I want to improve, so, what do you guys think, which is the best tool to use to display as large as possible?

I guess I could put all 3 on my site and see.

For instance I tried to optimize my architectural drawings, orig hairline in corel, now optimizing it makes it really fuzzy, so I had to leave what is there.

All inputs welcome, thanks

I use tons of photos on my site displaying fish caught on any particular day.
My camera takes photos from about 3-5 MP but these are way too big for the web, so I use any tool at my disposal to reduce the images (while keeping them in proportion) to 640 wide. I believe that they still have a very acceptable clarity while allowing a reasonable download time.

One thing about Lightbox though is that you must wait until all the photos have loaded before you click on an image to start the lightbox.

Check it out here if you wish:

http://www.ArlineFishingCharter.co.n...ober-2008.html
http://www.ArlineFishingCharter.co.n...mber-2008.html

Hi, the problem with the light box is that it reduces the main larger images in size & not kb's, this is partly why the thumbnail always look so distorted & also slows the pages down on loading. Was having a mess around with this one (link) & got the total page down to 105kb from 1600kb (including images), but had to compromise with using iframes or pop ups. Was using this FREE software. But i had to change 2 small parts on a css file that would only take 2 seconds.
Click on an image on the page or the blue image link as an alternitive.

The thumbnails do not distort unless you have made the box that they are fitting in too small. In otherwords, if you are using the lightbox and you find that the thumbnails are distorted, make the box larger and "hey presto" everything looks normal.

The downside is that the page can take a while to load but you need to work out a compromise between image quality and time taken to download.

If the time starts to takes too long, consider breaking the page into two pages or downsizing the quality of the images.

I think it all depends on what you are trying to achieve as to what decision you finally make.

Hi Muzza,

The thumbnails do not distort unless you have made the box that they are fitting in too small.

Not to sure what you mean by no distortion? Here is a very good example of a page on your site that has very distorted thumbnails & is very much over weight in kb’s by about 1.2meg because of using the light box. (Not sure on the limit? But its not that high, when many SE’s wont even index your pages when over a certain size in kb’s) Worth thinking about.

The downside is that the page can take a while to load but you need to work out a compromise between image quality and time taken to download.

There is no reason to have any downside on quality on any web page of the size we are talking about.
As described in the post above which has brought the page down from 1600kb to just over 100kb with no loss of quality.
A page with 50 images would still be under 300kb using the correct method & free software.
The light box is a light box, for 1 or 2 images & not a gallery for lots of images.
For this facility it is recommended that a proper image galley be use like the BV gallery, jalbum or a third party software, as this has the facility to reduce the thumbnails to a more reasonable size for multiple images on one web page & help with page loading many times faster for all visitors, especially those that may not have the facility of broadband. (Still at around 50% of the planet)

Cheers.

well done Deva..your website is easy to read, simple and clean. You success in your first step, now you need to improve your design skill to make your website more attractive. Thanks

www.bluelemonstudio.com

thanks asamboy, Muzza and Chris,
no particular order here, just thank you for your inputs.

Hey! Guys! no fighting in my thread, lol, just kidding.
Muzza, there are really distorted imgs on your site, have to agree.
Thanks for the link, Chris. Looks really cool.

Chris,
What I did: I ran all my jpegs through photoshop, optimized for web, and created 2 sets of galleries with webalbum generator, which, what I hope achieved, what you suggested. And I have my big jpegs, are they too big?

http://cgmulleralgarve.com/projectstudy.html
http://cgmulleralgarve.com/nearbypictures.html

just tested, some functionality here.

1. on the English part of my site, I seem to have gone down significantly, I think. Please correct me.
2. issue I'm not quite clear. I have 1 site with 2 languages. Now I'm questioning, if it is the best way to make 2 complete duplicate sets?
3. does my file volume in cpanel have an effect on somebody looking at my website?
the more I'm here, the more I feel like I know nothing, lol, but I learn a lot.

and again, thank you for helping,

nice site very easy to read i learn how to make pages o another languaje with out having a subdomain!!!!!! nice thatnks... lol....

Hi deva

Have a look at your potencial new project_study page(gallery) made completly using BV........This is fast loading, all on a single page and therefore will cut out 15 or so html pages.

http://bluevodamembersclub.com/membe...ect_study.html

If you want it, I will email to you.......just contact me.

You still haven't listened about what are the do's and dont's about keywording!! Otherwise, it's getting better. At least you have home page content now.

Originally Posted by Deva

t
Muzza, there are really distorted imgs on your site, have to agree.
,

Yeah, thanks guys for pointing it out. As I was saying earlier, with lightbox, you have to keep an eye on it and make sure that you haven't slapped too many images on per page. Otherwise the images start getting squashed. Obviously I wasn't practising what I was preaching (slapped wrist)

but thanks to you guys, and no customers today, I've had time to do a major overhaul of my Photo Gallery (added 12 new pages) and the distortion is fixed (fingers crossed.)

I forgot to say Chris, just in case you think I have a closed mind, I tried the IWebAlbum but all the downloads were corrupted and didn't work. I tried both the zip file and the windows installer a couple of times without success

Hi, you are certainly getting the kbs down on your images to help with page loading (A Lot, lot faster).
I must admit that I didn’t notice the site in two languages before, is this something more recent?
It’s now starting to become a larger site & it may have been worth having some sort of universal page template that would be good for all pages & both languages. (Believe me! many of us have rebuilt our sites many times to get it right) lol.
If you use the gallery it has certainly brought the page size down for faster loading (100kb in total on average), & David’s idea with the iframe works very well. The only thing with all of this is trying to keep it SE friendly as much as possible.


Hi Muzza,
i had ago at the download & got a similar problem with a new machine. But it is running vista & the other 2 machines are on xp (Works fine with xp). Would be a shame if it dos'nt work as it nice & cheap & works well. Have dropped then an email to them, to see if there is a fix.

Hi raganok, Ramsey, David, Muzza,

thanks for the feedback.

hi Ramsey,
thanks for looking again. Yes, I know, still have to work the seo. I did put it a little behind, because I thought, if my pages are slow than all the seo is not doing much. So I make sure that my website is rolling fine and no errors, and loads fast. Also still have to complete my translation and reduce my page weight in the Portuguese part. I ran it through an analyzer, that I found here somewhere and the major missing component seemed missing text in my pages, the rest seemed to be at some OK values, but I don't really know how to interpret the reading. And I also lost my original thread, so I couldn't find your recommendations on it anymore. But I'll promise I will not ignore it, just can work on so many things at once.

hi Chris,
yup, the Portuguese was always there, just in the form of the nav button and the first page in Portuguese saying that it was under construction, Since Sunday I did complete it, almost.

hi David,
I like that display a lot. Wrote you an email, so you have mine.

thanks guys, love to work with you
Deva

You have mail.

www.cgmulleralgarve.com

OK, I'm ready for the next round.

Thanks David, for the iframe help. I did understand how it works in the basic form, yet, I don't quite understand how it links "all" the pictures on the site to the iframe, since I'm only linking the iframe once for the first picture?

But here my request for the next round.

The SEO, is still an unknown animal to me, I tried to read up on it, but it is not really clear of what I could/should do.

thanks for your time,

Guido

ding, ding, 2nd round

On your 2nd and following pics just link to your larger picture as normal
then just put the name of the Iframe in the TARGET box (just below where you entered the link)

Have a look at the image properties on the sample form that I sent you.

Thanks David,
I had it working and now I understand how it works also.
thanks, worked out great
http://cgmulleralgarve.com/projectstudy.html

Man, this is the first time I've been back to your site for a while and the changes are huge. Looks great, apparently David has been giving some pretty good advice.

I'm not sure if you've got to the "nearby Beaches" part yet but that needs a bit of a look at. Starts out good but gets messier and messier the more pictures you look at.

Your Project study looks really good. So good I'm wondering if I can make it work on my site. Hmmmmmm