Reply To: Tips for my website?

[JimC]

I like your photos. The web site is a little rough though.

I’ll echo others. It runs very slowly. All the cool scripting and animation and whatnot being used is really slowing it down, to the point that people aren’t going to hang out. The more established photog down the road has a site that loads instantly. You need to be as good as he is.

Advice: download Google Chrome. In the menu, go to Tools => Developer Tools. It does a lot of really cool website analysis right from your browser, and can troubleshoot issues. Using the dev tools in Chrome, I found SEVERAL significant scripting problems that are slowing you down. Even with most of the site cached I’m still getting load times of 16+ seconds on your gallery page, which only shows me 9 images. By contrast, a very sloppily put together website I built using WordPress (of all things!) for my car club has a load time of 4.36 seconds for a gallery with 48 images of similar dimensions to yours, and I cleared my cache before running that test.

I can totally sympathize with the peril of having to wear multiple hats in running a small business. Your passion is photography, not web design. I’d never expect someone devoting their life to photography to also be able to carry a conversation about the pros and cons of ruby on rails or to find any entertainment from a site like stackoverflow.com. (Bonus points if you can define what “stack overflow” means without peeking on Google.) Because it’s not your area of expertise, it’s easy to fall into despair, especially with those awful “drag and drop to build your website” tools that companies like Wix (who appears to be your provider) host.

My advice is to start over on the site. Your options are as follows, 1: Hire a programmer to create a site for you, 2: learn a bunch of coding and re-do it yourself, or 3. start over using WordPress as a content management system. The best bang for your buck for getting your site up quickly is that third option. You can actually do some really neat things with wordpress, and I know a good number of photogs who use it for their sites. No, it’s not as professional as having a custom, purpose built site, but it’s infinitely better than what you have now. The “build your own site” tools create extremely poor code, and a website using them is going to be so horrid to get through that people will leave it before they can wait for it to load. 16 seconds for all your assets to load (when half of them are cached) was pathetic in 2002. Today, it’s unheard of. This must be fixed.