new website

Hi!
First thing I noticed is.. the really large picture you have there on your opening page – It took like 5 seconds for that picture to load and I’m on Fios. I’m not sure what would cause that as the picture itself isn’t that huge of a file size.

I think the site overall looks great, but your drop down menus are..odd. Like..they drop down right away, but it’s in a white box and it goes over top of your website text below it. It just looks..cheap. If you were able to get rid of the white box behind the font, that would probably resolve that issue. I think the same issue might be occurring elsewhere on your site as well. On your blog page the article “Update you Executive Portrait with a updated look.” has a picture in it that goes underneath your archive widget.

i do like your mix of pictures/blog combination as I think it looks readable.

Thanks for the feedback. A fresh perspective is always good. I did scale down the homepage image and changed to drop down menus. As far as the archive running over the photo? I guess I will just have to make smaller photos.
Andy

Your site is good. Layout, font-size is ok but it looks like a information site much. In my opinion you can add some images down your page to enhance its look and also you can drop height of your top image a bit as it is looking bit large. Otherwise your site is good.

the picture itself isn’t that huge of a file size.

I disagree. 679KB is extremely large for a hero image containing a few small photos on a blank canvas. And 187KB is enormous for the small row of logos below the main image. The total amount of data being downloaded on first view is 1,220KB. For a fairly straightforward site, that’s huge.

The problem is that there’s too much reliance on high-quality JPEGs to preserve the image quality. My guess is that both the hero graphic and the row of logos are saved at 100 quality. I understand that text and graphics with solid blocks of colour can deteriorate noticeably as you decrease the JPEG quality, but the solution in those cases is (1) to choose a middle-ground compression level (e.g. 90) or (2) not to use JPEG at all.

The hero image can be exported at about 85 quality with little visible deterioration. Since the website design is not responsive, you can also afford to resize the dimensions of the image from 1640×874 to around 950×506. This would cut the file size from 679KB to about 94KB (a saving of 86 per cent). The row of logos can be cut from 187KB to about 18KB (a saving of 90 per cent) by exporting them as PNG8 files with a non-transparent background.

Thank you Cyrll for the info and knowledge. TheMedia page photo and the logos are in my Media/Library. Can I change their sizes on the Edit Media page or open the originals in Photoshop and save them smaller with more compression?
Andy

You should open the originals, export them (with settings along the lines of what I’ve described), and then upload them again.

The problem is really not with the images. It is with other items as noted here:

https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.atempletonphoto.com/TT6TIoso

I have been quite successful in making photo sites work well…

Above all, if you want to share high quality images with your site visitors (as you very well should be as a photography site), work on the important issues as noted at link above.

And: then have a CDN host the images…Work towards the clients that will bring you $. Folks with poor internet service and old computers are not your target audience.

Pioneer, you’ve misread (1) the test data and (2) the suggestions that I’ve made.

First, as far as the test data from that service are concerned: if you expand the recommendations for Andy’s website, you’ll see that item 2 is this:

Serve scaled images

The following images are resized in HTML or CSS. Serving scaled images could save 525.6KiB (60% reduction).

That is the single biggest improvement suggested by that utility, by a very long way. The second biggest improvement is through minifying JS resources. The third biggest improvement is through image optimisation. All of this strongly supports the conclusion that reducing image file size is worth focusing on.

Secondly, my suggestion that images be optimised is valid. Portfolio images on a photography site should certainly be at high quality, in order to give prospective clients a good idea of the services provided. But I wasn’t referring to his portfolio/gallery images on other pages. I was talking specifically about the images on the home page: namely the hero image (which contains several photos at small sizes, making super-high detail redundant) and the logos (for which high-quality JPEG is again redundant).

I will stick by what I noted…one should expect a photography site to have large images in the content and the use of a CDN will speed this up. When we compress images for the web we lose quality.

Being a photography site, I would really include large photos. The site currently looks like a law firm’s website. Also, there’s about five different font types on the homepage alone.