My birdie website

This is my first ModX site. It is for my wife, she likes to advertise on myspace, but I felt we needed a website. It is hosted from my home on my Gentoo Linux box I had setup for a firewall.

http://sweetskies.fruitwerks.us (I will eventually convince her to get her own domain!)

I am done for the most part. My XHTML was valid until I switched over to gwidgets from thickbox, I’ll be working on that slowly. I know my CSS is a mess, I’m not good with CSS, never used it before actually. It looks better in IE than firefox, a little PNG transparency issue in IE6 though.

We do not plan to have a news section or a blog or a newsletter of any sort.

So please have a look and tell me what you like and hate and everything I am doing wrong (yes the footer is on top of the logo on purpose.)

- Ignore bad grammar and spelling as I have not checked any of that!

Thanks!

Some images are a bit too large imo, e.g. http://sweetskies.fruitwerks.us/images/birds/DSC03302.jpg
= 1024 x 1024 px
I think something like 600x600 or 800x800 px is big enough, otherwise people will have to scroll down to see the whole pic. I guess atm you scale them down via HTML, which is not so user-friendly; you’re still loading the big image and hence, wait more than necessary (lightbox).

Yeah they are large pictures I’ll probably go with 640x - did you find a picture that did not load in a lightbox? if so let me know the details (page, browser core / version..)

Thanks!

OK... I have little traffic, and that is fine - I have more demand than product.

What I am seeing is that people are visiting the default page and nothing more (a lot of the one-hits are referred from here).. About %15 click on a link, or two... or more. Most of my good traffic appears to be rather random with no referrers.

I know the site works and displays properly in the common browsers (haven’t tested any Mac OS though). I have visited the site outside of my lan and it loads just as quick as yahoo or msn. I know my look is rather simple, but for what we do it is 1000% cooler and functional than any other breeders websites I have seen.

What am I missing? (other than a blog and free unlocked iphones)

Thanks!

I know that no one in the web development world uses a modem connection anymore. Except me.
I also know that modem users still account for a large percentage of the north american web audience.
I couldn’t even wait for your home page to finish loading. I had to close the window.
From what I understand and what I saw of your content, there is nothing wrong with that. The copy is very succinct and to the point. It’s a niche market, and you’ve stressed the quality message well. If someone’s in the market for your product, I’m sure they’ll hang around your site to find everything out. You’re probably just getting lots of people on your site who aren’t really interested in what you sell.
0.02

@netProphET
Never mind about the modem connection. Highspeed internet has only made us with crazy fast connections more and more impatient. So where you are used to waiting 20 seconds for a page to load if the page takes more than 2 seconds on my 10MB connection.


@fruitwerks
First: don’t use the image dimension properties in HTML to resize your images. You need to invest in or at least use your photo editing software and used compressed jpgs for your web images (photos and some graphics). If you are using a small one and a large one you can resize these manually first to their actual dimension. Second MaxiGallery can do this for you if your server has GD installed for php. Your DSC09125.jpg image should resize nicely at 80% to about 30K vs the image you have on your page which is the full image weighing in at 430K. It would probably take about two full minutes for this page to load on a 56K modem connection. On my 10MB connection it took nearly 18 seconds. Most videos on YouTube don’t take that long to download (just the buffer).

Nice simple design though.

hint: there’s plenty of good free image apps out there. On Windows, I can recommend IrfanView and Picasa. With IV you can batch-edit entire folders within seconds...

hmm I just tried it from a new location and it was in the blink of my eye. On the index page is the only place I use the inline resize, I was in a hurry and have neglected that page a bit. I Do have photoshop, great investment btw. And my server has gd and / or imagemagik. The server is a dual xeon 1.7 with 512mb and a u160 scsi drive. I do outsource all of the other graphics thumbs to photobuket... I know kinda lame, but the actual pics are on the local machine. I do recall trying some type of gallery at one point but the server was just too slow at the on the fly conversions (could have been the disk, I have upgraded since).

So in short, the load time is crappy? I will squeeze down that first image and make a proper thumbnail for it.

When you are loading the page from cache it will not reload the images. Try using CTRL + F5 in Firefox or IE to see how long it takes to load.

MaxiGallery (a MODx Snippet) does all the gallery work on upload so thumbs are not done on the fly but on add. The big issue is if you are using huge images and they exceed your servers upload limits.

There is nothing wrong with storing your images off site so long as their servers are fast but I think in this case that the main thing was the index page having a near wallpaper sized image resized in the image property. Since you are going to fix it I would say you should be all right.

All the best,

Jay

Not sure if you noticed, but I am hosting from my gentoo box on my TWC cable line - 1mb up but I doubt I would have more than two people on my site ever.. lol. I was loading page after page and picture after picture remotely today and there was a 2-3 second delay to load full - well the lightbox pics. I know for a fact there was no caching involved. I feel if people click on that thumbnail, they will not mind waiting 5-10 secs for it to load. I’m about to optimized the image on the main page. I guess things are picking up - majority of hits are from google (and I’m not counting googlebot). I have one link partner and that is about 3% of hits so far.

Thanks!