New website

Hi Keith, were you looking for feedback?

keith_h wrote: More a statement on my part, but I am always keen to tap into the collective wisdom if you have time to share. Its worth pointing out the target audience is, well, fairly obvious, they don't seem to be hung up on ultimate IQ and its a volume thing. The website and gallery is what it is owing to using off the shelf parts (you have too dig to find the cart) and performance isn't stellar the further you get from the server. But I'll gratefully accept any guidance that helps improve things and drive sales. Thanks Keith

Hi Keith,

I just wanted to ask because it would be inappropriate to offer critique if you weren't expecting any. And naturally, it's a forum for discussing things related to photography business, so wanted to clarify what you wanted to discuss.

Anyway, the site looks good.

Clean, well laid out. Aligns properly on mobiles.

It is perhaps a bit lightweight - It's normal for people to want to know a little about you, if they didn't already. If someone mentions you to someone else, they might find your site but then not learn too much else. A simple "about" would suffice.

As for site performance I'd note:

- I get 9.4-11.3 seconds load time for the homepage. Tested 3 times. You want it under 3 ideally, 10 seconds is very slow.

- You could enable gznip compression

- Enable image scaling

- Compress the large format images further (for most rendering and viewers, it might surprise you how much you can compress and still get good results for web).

Try those things and test if it speeds up. Also, try removing any plugins that aren't absolutely essential, as they can slow your site down a lot. There is actually a really useful plugin you can use (and then remove) called "P3 - Plugin Performance Profiler". It'll test and show you which plugins are eating your load time. Some are just poorly designed, or don't play well with others, and this is a great way of finding out which ones aren't working so well. I currently run 7 and it is more than I've ever run before, I can probably remove 2-3 if needed and find different approaches.

On the selling images.

I think it's fine to be laid back with it but also I would be realistic. If you actually want to sell then that's great, but just putting images on a website isn't selling and is so far away from the best results. To share with you a secret: the vast majority of people do this and then when they get the occasional sale it acts as a reward and reinforces their decision - like a mental "yes, I was right, this works". What I'd do is develop a strategy for how you want people to come to you, why they'd come to you, and then the unique thing you want them to buy, and how. Then your website will just fit into this with the appropriate directions. This wouldn't take long at all to do a plan, then you just keep tweaking it as you move along.

I've made those changes. It seems the delays are largely DNS/server response time the further away from the server one is. I've done what I can but I doubt I can do much more with site performance.

Thanks again for the guidance. It is much appreciated.