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KilaTsunami
October, 2024

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I finally have a website, be my first critics/testers

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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
http://www.elichamberlin.com

After around 30 hours of upload, download, troubleshoot, delete, and repeat, my website has finally made it to a shareable state. Did it all on a wordpress theme so some things are harder to tweak than others but let me know what you think and any help on the opening banner copy (left side of the home page) would be great... it feels a bit stodgy at the moment. Hope you guys like it.

May 12 2011 4:33AM
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RudyGarmisch
Posts: 25443 - Karma: 13,844
Shows some promise.
May 12 2011 4:37AM
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LC.
Posts: 5952 - Karma: 2,423
Portfolio images load way too slowly.
May 12 2011 4:43AM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
thought this might be an issue... not really sure how to address it though.
May 12 2011 6:07AM
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JARRYD96
Posts: 65 - Karma: 10
although images are a little slow man overall a great website congrats on your work, nice stuff
May 12 2011 7:32AM
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michelle
Posts: 6290 - Karma: 428
Definitely a solid looking website. I really enjoy it.

The only thing I would change would be that paragraph on your home page. Everything up until "Hope you enjoy my work and feel free to contact me in order to put my skills at your disposal" is good. I think you can have something along those lines there, but I think it should be more assertive and confident. Like, "Enjoy my work and contact me to shoot your something". I don't know exactly what to say, but take out "hope" and "feel free" and "skills at your disposal". You have wicked good work, so be confident about it.
May 12 2011 8:24AM
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1337
Posts: 31054 - Karma: 29,231
need to use smaller image sizes, and not have an option for fullscreen. that's what's causing the lag.
May 12 2011 10:44AM
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andrewmeehan
Posts: 765 - Karma: 364
this is looking real good.

As people have said already, you should probably reword your opening paragraph.


May 12 2011 11:15AM
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benk
Posts: 1342 - Karma: 988
what are the image sizes you're uploading? my enlarged photos are only 800X530 72 DPI and I'm still trying to get my pictures to a smaller file size. other then that, you have great work and the layout was good. but I would remove and replace "..put my skills at your disposa..l" just sounds a little unprofessional.
May 12 2011 11:23AM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
word... thanks guys. The copy on the banner was just a mock up, I know it sounds awkward. Any help with that would be awesome. It's weird, I'm an English major but the hardest part of the site was writing that blurb. I'm gonna work on the speed issues today, hopefully it will be running smoothly by the afternoon.
May 12 2011 2:29PM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
think I got some of the speed issues resolved... might make them smaller still (constrained to max dimension of 1200 now down from 3600). Changed the copy around on the front page, still pretty meh about it but its a work in progress.

The only other problem is three images, "two women" "lions gate" (both under the city portfolio) and the "dewy stem" under the country. The thumbnails don't load. I reuploaded them and checked for any discrepencies between them and the other photos and I got nothing. Any ideas?
May 12 2011 3:33PM
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LC.
Posts: 5952 - Karma: 2,423
Why the hell did you have them set to 3600? Of course that's going to slow things down. 1200 is still bigger than necessary. Personally I don't like full screen; 900px width is plenty.
May 12 2011 4:52PM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
hahaha... it was just a bad tweak. I uploaded them all in full rez thinking that I would readily be able to adjust their output size (clearly i was wrong). And I went to 1200 for now because its easier to go smaller than bigger. Will probably go to 900. Thanks for the input.
May 12 2011 5:35PM
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NJurkiewicz
Posts: 1597 - Karma: 697
the site looks great! good job!
May 12 2011 10:19PM
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S.C
Posts: 3068 - Karma: 2,285
other than the sizing issue, it looks great. What do you shoot with?
May 12 2011 10:27PM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
Canon 20D I got like 5 years ago... really need to scrape together some cash for an upgrade
May 13 2011 2:37PM
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BigJew
Posts: 6974 - Karma: 79
Change the font on the left side of the front page. I don't know what font you chose, but it's defaulting to Times New Roman and looks bad compared to the rest of the site. Aside from that, sexxy.


I have no problems with the images loading slow either.
May 13 2011 5:41PM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
hmm, its on courier, anyone else having this problem?
May 13 2011 7:34PM
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BigJew
Posts: 6974 - Karma: 79
Must be a bug with Firefox 4, because it works fine in IE. Either way, a significant number of users will be using FF4 so it's in your best interest to work around this any way you can.
May 13 2011 9:05PM
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Elife
Posts: 2829 - Karma: 44
no one else has had this problem, just did a cross platform, cross browser check... I'll work on it later but right now, off to whistler for the weekend. Thanks to everyone for their critiques, +k all around and don't forget to vote for me under the arts tab on http://urbancultureconference.com. Thanks again!
May 13 2011 9:09PM
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