That’s how a photography website should be done. No unnecessary flash just a simple layout that shows the work with excellent javascript to aid the users experience.
That maybe your opinion, but it is certainly not a general dogma.
I’d prefer pics in Full size to experience them even more. I am not a real fan of flash sites or better I am a fan when you dont feel it is flash.
And a photography website could the perfect theme playground.
I work on a lot of photography sites and even though I like the overall look and feel, I don’t think it sets the standard. One element I do really like is the photographers story behind each image, makes the whole experience very personal and approachable.
Nothing with Flash being used on a website, especially one that has mostly images, graphics, and media, rather than text. Flash still loads media faster, which in the end, is for the benefit of the user.
The mouseover behavior should be fixed on detail pages.
When you move the mouse over the image, then move it a bit right (or left) and wait for arrows to fade, it won’t show you the arrows until you move the mouse completely out and over the image.
After three or four images I find the arrows should be placed outside the images, in the black label/legend area. That would make the alt tooltip on the images a lot less evident.
Interesting, there’s no contact button or mail or even form. It makes his facebook/flickr/twitter profiles the only way to get in touch.
Still in High School I see. Unfortunately, it is you that has no clue.
1) Flash loads media faster simply because all the data is compressed. Flash has the best available compression you can find. It’s why Flash is used for videos on YouTube.
1.a) If you attempted to load the same amount of images on this Flash site via HTML, with the same quality, you would waiting longer. HTML masks this by “loading on the fly”, so while you are seeing images and content appear, they have yet to fully load. However, if you measure total page load, a media-heavy Flash site will load nearly 3x faster than an HTML site with the same content.
2) “Stupid Music” is a choice made by the Flash programmer. It has nothing to do with Flash itself as a medium for building websites. The same “stupid music” can be played on an HTML website with a Javascript player if one so wishes.
3) Stand-alone Flash files do not do as well because they are exactly that: files. If a Flash site is programmed properly, and pulls the data from an XML page (which Google can effectively read), you can have an SEO-friendly site with a rich user environment.
Properly programmed Flash sites can also be bookmarked, made database-sourced, shared, turned into a CMS, have resizing text, and render 3D graphics on the fly.
Mootools is great, but it will take at least a decade for HTML to provide the same level of power which Flash currently gives. The only real drawback of Flash is that it requires the user to have it installed before they can view.
So for the sake of your career in this industry, it would help to understand a lot more about a certain topic, rather than simply copy-pasting some other ignorant person’s rant about “why X suxorz.”
Thank you all for your feedback, let me address a few questions/points people have raised regarding the choice of Javascript over Flash etc.
Firstly you must all know that the first version of this site was entirely built with Flash, it loaded the images from the same backend which is currently used, through an XML feed. But I decided that all the effects which I was using could be replicated with Javascript and so they were, no doubt it does leave some things to be desired such as fullscreen previews, but rest assured they’re coming.
To everyone who said ‘Flash loads images faster, because of XYZ’ this is a myth, Flash still uses standard HTTP requests to load assets from a server, the compression comes from the server, not Flash, you can’t compress something before you receive it :-p My site uses gzip compression and heavy caching instructions on the server to ensure the images are loaded at the maximum speed.
My view is that while Flash is a great plugin, in most cases its still overkill, and I can’t justify it for sites requiring extensive SEO work, and I’m not some inexperienced try hard Flash developer, I’ve been developing with AS2/3 for over 4 years.
Igor: You must be using Internet Explorer, I have not completed IE compatibility as yet it only consumes 7% of my traffic. All standards compliant browsers are supported.
Rich: Thanks for the photoshop tip but let me give you some insight:
This site is completely automated, at no point do I resize or compress any images. Once I have finished post production of a photo its uploaded to Flickr straight from Aperture, Flickr then notifies an automated script on my server which pulls the original file in from Flickr and resizes it to fit the site, along with all the meta data, comments, location data etc and stores it in a local database.
Technologies used on this site:
Front end: XHTML, CSS, jQuery
Back end: Ruby on Rails, Apache, Ubuntu.
I’m no trying hard developer myself. However, when you save media into swf or flv files, their overall sizes are reduced. While the transfer still requires standard protocols, the sizes of the media files (if saved as swf or flv) are comparably smaller as opposed to using ordinary images.
Still, this is going off topic. I think your site is excellent. I’m just not particularly fond of biased ranting.
11 Comments
That’s how a photography website should be done. No unnecessary flash just a simple layout that shows the work with excellent javascript to aid the users experience.
That maybe your opinion, but it is certainly not a general dogma.
I’d prefer pics in Full size to experience them even more. I am not a real fan of flash sites or better I am a fan when you dont feel it is flash.
And a photography website could the perfect theme playground.
I work on a lot of photography sites and even though I like the overall look and feel, I don’t think it sets the standard. One element I do really like is the photographers story behind each image, makes the whole experience very personal and approachable.
Nice site
A nice site. Even without using the flash it came a good job! Good portfolio!
Nothing with Flash being used on a website, especially one that has mostly images, graphics, and media, rather than text. Flash still loads media faster, which in the end, is for the benefit of the user.
The mouseover behavior should be fixed on detail pages.
When you move the mouse over the image, then move it a bit right (or left) and wait for arrows to fade, it won’t show you the arrows until you move the mouse completely out and over the image.
After three or four images I find the arrows should be placed outside the images, in the black label/legend area. That would make the alt tooltip on the images a lot less evident.
Interesting, there’s no contact button or mail or even form. It makes his facebook/flickr/twitter profiles the only way to get in touch.
Flash is terrible and anyone who claims it is good really has no clue. Javascript is where it is at.
Example of how awfull flash is:
1) user visits site and has to wait for god knows how long until the site loads.
2) User is bombarded by stupid music which usually comes with most flash sites, because people think you care.
3) User trys to find the site on Google but struggles because flash is not that great when it comes to SEO.
All it takes is for people to learn Mootools and the internet would b a better place
Nice site, I think your image file sizes are a bit bloated though, try saving them as 10 in photoshop and that should make the site work a lot faster.
Rich:
Still in High School I see. Unfortunately, it is you that has no clue.
1) Flash loads media faster simply because all the data is compressed. Flash has the best available compression you can find. It’s why Flash is used for videos on YouTube.
1.a) If you attempted to load the same amount of images on this Flash site via HTML, with the same quality, you would waiting longer. HTML masks this by “loading on the fly”, so while you are seeing images and content appear, they have yet to fully load. However, if you measure total page load, a media-heavy Flash site will load nearly 3x faster than an HTML site with the same content.
2) “Stupid Music” is a choice made by the Flash programmer. It has nothing to do with Flash itself as a medium for building websites. The same “stupid music” can be played on an HTML website with a Javascript player if one so wishes.
3) Stand-alone Flash files do not do as well because they are exactly that: files. If a Flash site is programmed properly, and pulls the data from an XML page (which Google can effectively read), you can have an SEO-friendly site with a rich user environment.
Properly programmed Flash sites can also be bookmarked, made database-sourced, shared, turned into a CMS, have resizing text, and render 3D graphics on the fly.
Mootools is great, but it will take at least a decade for HTML to provide the same level of power which Flash currently gives. The only real drawback of Flash is that it requires the user to have it installed before they can view.
So for the sake of your career in this industry, it would help to understand a lot more about a certain topic, rather than simply copy-pasting some other ignorant person’s rant about “why X suxorz.”
Thank you all for your feedback, let me address a few questions/points people have raised regarding the choice of Javascript over Flash etc.
Firstly you must all know that the first version of this site was entirely built with Flash, it loaded the images from the same backend which is currently used, through an XML feed. But I decided that all the effects which I was using could be replicated with Javascript and so they were, no doubt it does leave some things to be desired such as fullscreen previews, but rest assured they’re coming.
To everyone who said ‘Flash loads images faster, because of XYZ’ this is a myth, Flash still uses standard HTTP requests to load assets from a server, the compression comes from the server, not Flash, you can’t compress something before you receive it :-p My site uses gzip compression and heavy caching instructions on the server to ensure the images are loaded at the maximum speed.
My view is that while Flash is a great plugin, in most cases its still overkill, and I can’t justify it for sites requiring extensive SEO work, and I’m not some inexperienced try hard Flash developer, I’ve been developing with AS2/3 for over 4 years.
Igor: You must be using Internet Explorer, I have not completed IE compatibility as yet it only consumes 7% of my traffic. All standards compliant browsers are supported.
Rich: Thanks for the photoshop tip but let me give you some insight:
This site is completely automated, at no point do I resize or compress any images. Once I have finished post production of a photo its uploaded to Flickr straight from Aperture, Flickr then notifies an automated script on my server which pulls the original file in from Flickr and resizes it to fit the site, along with all the meta data, comments, location data etc and stores it in a local database.
Technologies used on this site:
Front end: XHTML, CSS, jQuery
Back end: Ruby on Rails, Apache, Ubuntu.
-
Ivan Vanderbyl
@Ivan
I’m no trying hard developer myself. However, when you save media into swf or flv files, their overall sizes are reduced. While the transfer still requires standard protocols, the sizes of the media files (if saved as swf or flv) are comparably smaller as opposed to using ordinary images.
Still, this is going off topic. I think your site is excellent. I’m just not particularly fond of biased ranting.
Is a nice site and a good works. The graphic is good and for me is light to highlight the projects.