Please critique my new gallery website template.

[Free]

As mentioned in a previous thread I'm building a photo gallery website template for an open source Content Management System called MODx.

I now have an almost final version online at http://freeotoole.com/Home/my-modx-gallery.htm

I'd love to hear your feedback so I can get this thing as useful and relevant as possible for the general photographic community.

I've got a few issues so far, but I'd like to see if it's noticeable to anyone else.

I'm planning to put a few more basic graphics such as arrows and icons etc soon, but that shouldn't affect the design much, just make the final product even better. I will also be incorporating child galleries asap.

Also, if anyone wants to beta test the pre-release, I'd be happy to whip up a basic text based logo or incorporate any existing logos / basic colour schemes and give you a hand setting it up. Say up to the first 6 people from here and other websites I'm on. - yes, that means a free website! you just need to sort out your own hosting and tell me what you think is good or bad about the site after using it for a while.

Oh, and I almost forgot - if there's enough interest I'll look at porting it to Wordpress (or preferably let someone else do it). It'll be released under creative commons attribution license.

Thanks in advance
Free

[OsmosisStudios]

It looks good. Some graphical touch-ups are necessary, but it's solid. I still find the distance between the main blocks (text/imgs or imgs/imgs) to be too close.

My only real complaint though: it's SLOW. Like, PAINFULLY. Youre not re-sizing the images in the browser, so I really have NO idea why its that slow. Your rollovers took forever, the images were slow to load, pages were slow to changeover.

Im not talking like "click.... wait 10 seconds.... done" but the rollovers are meant to be instantaneous, not delayed by a second and a half.

[Free]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

My only real complaint though: it's SLOW. Like, PAINFULLY. Youre not re-sizing the images in the browser, so I really have NO idea why its that slow. Your rollovers took forever, the images were slow to load, pages were slow to changeover.

Im not talking like "click.... wait 10 seconds.... done" but the rollovers are meant to be instantaneous, not delayed by a second and a half.

??? How's the rest of your browsing going? By "roll overs" I'm guessing you're referring to the lighter grey navigation backgrounds? If so they are css and there are absolutely no images there, once the css file is loaded that should be an instantaneous effect regardless of images still loading.

The photos are probably a little bigger in file size than they need to be, I compressed then to the best possible quality, so each photo is around 200kb, that would be greatly reduced if I set the compression quality to 80%. - Just looked at the entire folder, some of the images are 350K, that's huge! That'll learn me for only looking at the design/build, not the content going in I've just optimised them all a bit better

I also realised I didn't mention I have not made it work in Internet Exporer 6 and earlier yet, it'll look really nasty if you're using IE6, this will be fixed on the final build. Everything should be working in modern browsers though.

[fletch]

Originally Posted by Free

I also realised I didn't mention I have not made it work in Internet Exporer 6 and earlier yet, it'll look really nasty if you're using IE6, this will be fixed on the final build. Everything should be working in modern browsers though.

I doesn't do too bad in IE6 but it does need some work. As for speed it was fine.

[OsmosisStudios]

The grey rollover on the menu takes about a second and a half for the first time it needs to be called, but is fine afterwards.

Image loading was still slow, but better. Are you using SAVE AS or SAVE FOR WEB in Photoshop? The former will give you much larger files than the latter at the same quality.

[morts]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

The grey rollover on the menu takes about a second and a half for the first time it needs to be called, but is fine afterwards.

Image loading was still slow, but better. Are you using SAVE AS or SAVE FOR WEB in Photoshop? The former will give you much larger files than the latter at the same quality.

True.

Save for web strips out unnecessary pallette data, for instance.

[Free]

I actually used Lightroom for the first save at 100%, then I just opened the folder in Photshop and automated a "save as" rather than a "save for web".

Checking Firebugs logs and the thumbnails are adding a heap of time too, for those I had them all in one PS file and exported layers to files, again there's no option (that I know of) to save for web during automated exports.

I do have some actions to save for web, but not from layers and not from entire folders without opening every image and running the action for each image.

As I'm just using my own images for example content at the moment, I'm not going to spend any more time optimising them, I'll be focusing on making the final tweaks to the design and CMS templates hopefully have it in the MODx repository withing a few weeks.

Thanks for your comments,
Free

[OsmosisStudios]

If you have an action, there should be an entry under FILE > Automate that allows you to set an action to an entire folder. I know its in CS4, but Im pretty sure it was a CS3 add-in.

[Free]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

If you have an action, there should be an entry under FILE > Automate that allows you to set an action to an entire folder. I know its in CS4, but Im pretty sure it was a CS3 add-in.

Sweet, I'll look into that

I suppose I'll need to upgrade to CS4 sometime soon, I'm still deciding whether or not I'll switch to Mac or not so I've held off on any big software purchases.

Cheers
Free