Reading your laments in conjunction with your defense of your design
decisions strongly reminds me of a TV show I saw a few years ago. It
was about a chef whose main business was troubleshooting restaurants
with financial problems. In one episode the restaurant owner had
decided to open for breakfast in addition to the lunch and dinner fare
that he had served all along. He complained to the adviser that all he
had accomplished was increasing his overhead because, after an initial
surge of business, breakfast traffic has fallen off considerably.
The adviser examined the menu and told the owner that he thought his
breakfast menu choices were not the best. In particular, he was
incredulous that Eggs Benedict was not on the menu because it was by far
one of any restaurant's most popular offerings. He demanded of the
owner to explain why. The owner's response? "I don't like Eggs
Benedict". Case closed.
Chuck Norcutt
On 12/26/2010 9:31 AM, Brian Swale wrote:
> Thanks to Chris and Nathan for their insightful comments.
>
> I had already decided some months ago to increase the horizontal
> dimension of the largest image I display, from 350 to 450 pixels.
>
> There aren't many at the largest size simply because I haven't added any
> new images, literally, for months. Somewhat disillusioned I guess, and too
> busy with other distractions.
>
> I have just spent about 2 hours looking at galleries I have bookmarked over
> the past couple of years, and the navigation of many is a lot worse than what
> I offer. I'm not sure what to do about this. These galleries all were
> written by
> contracted web-designers, and not created by using off-the-shelf software.
>
> When I look at a matrix of thumbnails on somebody's page, I never go from
> one image to the next ( unless there's no choice, as, for example, in
> Nathan's blogs which in obligatory manner load all progressively in
> sequence, from the top).
>
> I will pick out, say 3 - 5 from the 20 or so and look at those. Takes too long
> otherwise. So, obviously wrongly, I assumed other people browsed the
> same way.
>
> There are two reasons why I have made the thumbnails so small (from
> memory the width is 70 pixels)
> (1) to have the index pages load as fast as reasonably possible, which
> means keeping the file size to under 50kb. Not always easy. They still seem
> to take ages to load.
> (2) to fit as many per screenful as the constrained size of my index pages
> allow.
>
> I will look at marginally increasing these a bit.
>
> Similarly, I try to keep the image file size for the "final" image to around
> 100
> kb maximum, for speed of loading. This is also the reason I prefer "pure"
> html; it is infinitely faster than Flash, and similarly faster than
> javascript etc
> filled pages such as the "greatpix-eu" that Nathan uses for some of his
> pages; these take forever to load. The site that Ian Wilcox uses is similarly
> very slow to load.
> Sites where the image files are greater than, say 300 kb, I turn off unless
> I'm
> *really* interested in the image.
>
> I realise that the small monitor that I have is a limitation for page
> authoring. I
> don't have much option about this for the foreseeable future.
>
> Thanks for the positive comments about my image quality. I get so little
> feedback from anybody who might know what they are talking about that I
> often wonder how they stack up in the global mix, objectively speaking.
>
> Chris asked why I wanted to know how he went back a couple or three
> pages in a Google search, on his laptop. I wondered in my head, if the
> method used for that would also be OK when looking at my galleries.
> Probably not, seems to be the feedback.
>
> The only place where I have the potential for a sequential viewing of images
> is in the main front page www.brianswale.com/
> where, under the main introductory image is a line of numbers.
> Clicking on any one of the first 9 of these will bring up what looks like a
> new
> image on the front page. (In fact it is a series of fresh substitute pages).
>
> Thanks for the comments. (AG also commented earlier)
>
> Brian Swale.
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