After feedback on our new retouch website :)

[damien@retouch]

Hi All,

Myself and my business partner are keen to have someone on call to be a 3rd retoucher for our online retouching business. If you live in Australia mainly sydney or brisbane contact us via our website.

(Note: Australian residents only)

Regards

Damien

[shellby]

Looks really professional. The navigation along the top with the images looks great. Loads well.

[NancyJ]

Looks good - a little slow loading though (I'm on 10mb Broadband) you might want to try compressing your images. Some are around 200k - I compressed one down to around 15k and honestly, you cant tell the difference, granted you wont be able to compress them all that much but no image should be above about 50k.

[damien@retouch]

Thanks Nancy.

Was this in the portfoilo section you are talking about?

If so I will take a look at compressing them further as soon as I have some time

p.s. what does 10mb mean as far as broadband its obviously not bandwidth?

in Austranlia we have 128k, 256k, 512k, 1mb bandwidth and so on.

[NancyJ]

10Mb is the bandwidth.
Yes, this was the portfolio. But at work (I think its a 256k) it took 17 seconds to download the homepage.

[aylaah]

I'm in Oz and the highest going (rare and only in limited supply) is 8meg

I'm on 1500/256 (the 'normal' highest, pre-ADSL2).

I'll go test again and edit the post to update.

Ok - homepage loaded within 2 seconds, but since I've seen it before it might be for that reason, so I tried other pages - all loaded almost instantly and the longest load for portfolio (purposely chose pics I had not looked at previously) was about 4 sec.

[NancyJ]

4s is a long time on 8mb broadband. Just think how long it would take on dial-up

[aylaah]

I'm not on 8mb, I'm on 1.5mb - I do know what you mean though, I was thinking in comparison to your times, not dial up, so good point.

[damien@retouch]

Yeah thats weird cause I am on 256k and it only took 8 secs to load the homepage (after clearing cookies).

I did compress them heaps when I first posted the site but seriously you could tell the difference in quality in didnt look to flash.

I will play around with it more though when i get some time because yeah your right it can be a little too long. Dial up would be very frustrating I am guessing.

Thanks for the advice

[aylaah]

Thinking back more to when I had dial up, flash sites in general used to take a long time to load, somewhat regardless of how graphic-intensive they were once opened. Its like having kids, once you get on ADSL its so easy to forget what it was like to work daily with dial up!

I found on my last business site (totally unrelated to retouching), we were graphic-intensive but got a lot of comments in guestbook by people commending the fast loading time. We didn't use any flash though, and offered two ways to view photographs - through a main page in small format, as well as in a portfolio style (actually a shopping cart, lol) where the small picture was clickable and popped up a larger version.

On the site I'm building now, I'm having most pics an average of 100kb, and getting it by both resizing the images and compression which is averaging about an '8' in quality when doing it in PS. I also have mentioned compression and the ability to view higher-quality images if interested.

[c hurd]

Looks Good! Did you mean to put "specializes" in the first row of your home page text?

I have high speed cable and the speed was fine for me...

[shellby]

specialise is the correct word there.

Also spelling in America would be with a Z and Internationally with S.

[aylaah]

We have many less z's in our language generally - things that end in 'ise' for us often are 'ize' for US english. We also use U in colour and favourite, lol. (was having this conversation elsewhere today!)