# My New site - www.TTMphoto.com



## Travis (Oct 14, 2007)

*I just created a website this weekend: www.TTMphoto.com*

(TTM are my initials). 

My reason for making, and plans for the site are: 
- - A place to keep portfolios of work (currently have a model and a nightlife portfolio - two types of shooting that I want to get into, so I'm hoping these can help me get work in those areas - both paid and TF*)
- - A place to keep and show personal photography (which I don't have on there yet)

*Any feedback on the site or portfolios will be appreciated!*

(I just created the site today and there are a few basic changes I'm planning on making -- one is in the portfolios, on some browsers, an orange circle borders the pictures, I will get rid of that, there are also some little things that shouldn't show up here and there, not much. But I haven't tested it yet on any Windows browsers, so if you're using IE and it looks really funny, that may be why)


----------



## alan927 (Oct 18, 2007)

Not bad, but a couple points:

1.  On "Make Contact" do you really want to invite people to drunk dial you?  Prospective clients probably don't want to see that (I was a bit surprised).

2.  The text "Nightlife Galleries" scrolls off the left side of the page (FF on XPSP2), so it's just "ightlife Galleries".  Maximizing to 1280x1024 fixed it, but most people don't browse at that resolution.

3.  Thumbnails load really slow, and the lightbox effect doesn't work until all thumbs have been loaded.  You should look into either getting the lightbox to work sooner, use fewer thumbs per page, or some other optimization.

4.  Under the thumbs, the page keeps scrolling with black space.  Is that intentional?

I do like the concept behind the homepage, though, and you said the site wasn't thoroughly tested so little things like these should be fixable.


----------



## Travis (Oct 19, 2007)

1.) "Drunk Dial me". Yeah I will take that out. I have very few, if any, perspective clients looking at the page now and I just threw that in. 

2.) Yeah, the way I have that setup is everyting is centered, and the "Nightlife Galleries" link is ofset a certain amount of cells from center, so is the window is not wide enough it drops off... I'll move that closer to center. 

3.) The thumbnails load slow because they are not really thumbnails, they are the full images scaled down... This is bad because it takes a while to load the pages. It is good because once the page is loaded, the lightboxes (should) come up with no delay when you click an image. Could you (or someone) load one of the pages with pictures, and let me know how long it takes and which page it was. I timed one of the larger pages at over 10 seconds, which is probably too much, right? I wonder if I'd  be able to get the page setup so that actual thumbnails load first,.. and then once those are done, the full size pictures are loaded but not displayed anywhere. That way the thumbnails load fast and the large pictures would also get pre-loaded. I'll try it out first just using real thumbnails and see how long it takes to load the individual images each time a lightbox opens. 

4.) Nope. That's easy to fix though. 

Thanks again!!


----------



## Travis (Nov 8, 2007)

alan927 said:


> Not bad, but a couple points:
> 
> 1.  On "Make Contact" do you really want to invite people to drunk dial you?  Prospective clients probably don't want to see that (I was a bit surprised).
> 
> ...



Here are the changes I've made since the original post: 

1.) Made the "Make Contact" link description more professional
2.) Repositioned links on the main page to work with smaller resolutions or browser windows
3.) Improved thumbnail loading speed big time. It takes longer to bring up the lightbox now, but I think it's better - it was annoying waiting for the thumbnails to load. 
4.) Made the thumbnails all the exact same size and orientation to cleanup the gallery pages I think this made a pretty big difference and it makes it easier for me to make the pages
5.) Removed the image link borders that show up on certain browsers

6.) - Still need to do this -- change the page size so there is not blank space below the gallery pictures. 


Any other suggestions/opinions/advice?


----------

