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keith_h ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 22 May 2006 Country: Australia Location: Australia Status: Offline Posts: 3124 |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Posted: 13 June 2016 at 13:18 |
About 3 months ago I broke my hand and had to stop riding my bike. Once my hand recovered a little (and it took a while) I got the cameras out and started following the bike racing as a spectator.
The interest in the images was strong and I was encouraged to create somewhere people could access images, and here it is: http://images.heinrich.id.au/ Its built from Wordpress and nextgen gallery and is deliberately plain. I'd be pleased if it pays for a few coffees to be honest, but lets see how it goes. Launched Sunday June 12. |
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ricardovaste ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 08 August 2007 Country: United Kingdom Location: Shropshire Status: Offline Posts: 10076 |
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Hi Keith, were you looking for feedback?
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I photograph the moments in people's lives that mean the most to them: Richard Harris Photography
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keith_h ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 22 May 2006 Country: Australia Location: Australia Status: Offline Posts: 3124 |
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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 |
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ricardovaste ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 08 August 2007 Country: United Kingdom Location: Shropshire Status: Offline Posts: 10076 |
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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. |
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I photograph the moments in people's lives that mean the most to them: Richard Harris Photography
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keith_h ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 22 May 2006 Country: Australia Location: Australia Status: Offline Posts: 3124 |
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Great feedback thanks.
Link to performance test I checked into all the performance elements you documented. The gallery engine is the biggest consumer, the images on the front page slider need to be smaller. I am using a cache with gzip enabled. I think I can shave a bit more time from load speeds and improve responsiveness. I'll certainly give it a shot. I have a marketing plan which includes an associated FB page for distributing new images. The number of hits, comments etc has been great but the amount of traffic back to the website is at present low. I know why and I'll sort that out with the next shoot I push out. I'll be handing out cards when I shoot as well to help people find the website. The about page is a great idea and I'll get onto it. Thanks again for taking time to provide feedback. |
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keith_h ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 22 May 2006 Country: Australia Location: Australia Status: Offline Posts: 3124 |
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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.
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ricardovaste ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 08 August 2007 Country: United Kingdom Location: Shropshire Status: Offline Posts: 10076 |
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Hi Keith,
My mistake. I'd selected the wrong location for speed testing previously. Anywhere in the US/EU seems to give long times, but this is pretty meaningless as for your actual traffic in Australia, your speed is under 2 seconds, which is perfect. So, please disregard my remarks about speed (although the specific adjustments are still useful). Best of luck, let us know how it goes! |
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I photograph the moments in people's lives that mean the most to them: Richard Harris Photography
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keith_h ![]() Senior Member ![]() Joined: 22 May 2006 Country: Australia Location: Australia Status: Offline Posts: 3124 |
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Thanks again for the guidance. It is much appreciated.
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