I'm a member of quite a few photography forums. I've noticed that a lot of people post their sites on these forums and ask others for comments, suggestions, insights, etc. I happen to think this is a great idea and I suspect that these folks do get some good advice. One overwhelming item that I've noticed cropping up over and over again is the complexity of design and the size of the pages on some sites. These items often go hand in hand. I've seen some folks with 2 MB homepages and others that have some kind of Flash homepage that takes 30+ seconds to load. Additionally funky navigation (which many seem to feel is cool) can also interfere with the ability of search engine spiders to follow the links on your site and place your valuable pages in their searchable index (this depends how the nav is coded - sometimes it is ok sometimes it is not. There is a great little tool for checking page spiderability at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/).
This seems to be the age-old (or at least 10-12 years old!) dilemma of "artists" building websites. If an artist builds the site they can sometimes be so engrossed in making it look amazing that they forget about the usability. Whereas a purely technical guy may make the site very functional but it often doesn't look like much. I suppose a marriage of the two is best. I would strongly caution photographers from building websites that use copius amounts of flash (some can be ok if used correctly) and from creating very heavy (read page weight) pages. If a user can't load your pages in at least 5-8 seconds then you've likely lost them (faster is, of course, better). This can also be a function of your hosting company so try and make sure you get a good one - this is not easy (from my experience) but it can be done. You also may be thinking that page weight is no longer an issue because everyone uses broadband these days. Well, yes most folks seem to be using broadband now - but not everyone - I still have people visiting my site with dial-up. Also, even broadband can get a little slow when there is congestion. Ultimately, having someone being able to view your site - even without much in the way of fancy designs or features, is better than not having them look at it at all.
Sounds straightforward but it can be a little tricky when your business is related to images (which often make page weight a problem). The trick here is to ensure you optimize them for the web and you don't place too many on a page. There is a tremendous amount written about optimizing images for the web so I won't delve into that here. I also believe programs like Photoshop have some kind of "optimize image for web" features built in (at least I think they do - I don't presently use Photoshop).
This seems to be the age-old (or at least 10-12 years old!) dilemma of "artists" building websites. If an artist builds the site they can sometimes be so engrossed in making it look amazing that they forget about the usability. Whereas a purely technical guy may make the site very functional but it often doesn't look like much. I suppose a marriage of the two is best. I would strongly caution photographers from building websites that use copius amounts of flash (some can be ok if used correctly) and from creating very heavy (read page weight) pages. If a user can't load your pages in at least 5-8 seconds then you've likely lost them (faster is, of course, better). This can also be a function of your hosting company so try and make sure you get a good one - this is not easy (from my experience) but it can be done. You also may be thinking that page weight is no longer an issue because everyone uses broadband these days. Well, yes most folks seem to be using broadband now - but not everyone - I still have people visiting my site with dial-up. Also, even broadband can get a little slow when there is congestion. Ultimately, having someone being able to view your site - even without much in the way of fancy designs or features, is better than not having them look at it at all.
Sounds straightforward but it can be a little tricky when your business is related to images (which often make page weight a problem). The trick here is to ensure you optimize them for the web and you don't place too many on a page. There is a tremendous amount written about optimizing images for the web so I won't delve into that here. I also believe programs like Photoshop have some kind of "optimize image for web" features built in (at least I think they do - I don't presently use Photoshop).
0 comments:
Post a Comment