Hi, I'm Alex Luckhardt... fourteen... and a nature/landscape photographer...

jocose · Sep 16, 2005

Alex,

I took a quick at the site...looks pretty good. My only comment on the site itself is that you might want to change the white writing to a darker color...it's kind of hard to read on the green background...but that could just be me

As far as the pics, I'm too new to comment on the quality, but I really like the one of the tree with the snow (I think it's the second one on the portfolio page. I also like the country road one.

Keep up the good work!

vonnagy · Sep 20, 2005

now thats interesting, you've used microsoft office to create a website? I didn't know that was possible

. Its not a big deal, but you may want to use a program to clean up some of the source html, as m$ buts alot of stuff in the source thats not needed. If this is the first website you've built I'm impressed, good effort matey

You got some promising work there - I too like the picture of the snowy tree. thanks for sharing your site.

acluckhardt · Sep 20, 2005

hobbes28 · Sep 20, 2005

Keep it as a single image and save it as a gif or a jpg but it seems that you have too many dpi for this to load quickly. They are relatively small files each but there is something going on with it. Could even be your host not having a fast enough connection because it's pretty slow here and we have 4meg cable.

acluckhardt · Sep 20, 2005

vonnagy · Sep 21, 2005

alex, check the webmaster sticky thread above, there is a download speed tool there thats quite handy for measuring your sites performances and gives a decent analysis of what you need to do for faster download times.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

To optimise it for speed, you should try to make what ever text in the graphic as text on the website and use tables, inline styles to format it correctly. It may not look exactly how you want it too, but download time will never be an issue.

Below probably will not be very precise, but its the approach i would take. Its just to give you some ideas of the possibilities:

This is how I would seperate the image elements:
1. The background (starbust)
2. The globe
3. the rest can be done with tables and stylesheets/inline styles

1.
With the image you have. you can position the starburst image in the background of a table cell as gif. My guess is that you you only need to save the image with 32 colours, its only black and white. that should save some download time.

2.
Within the table that contains the gif above, you can then place a table within the center with your text. The font looks like Arial, so you should be safe by using it on your website. You make the borders red by using inline styles - just experiment with those until you get it right:

<td style="border-left:#ff0000;border-top:#ff0000;">

3.
Finally you can put the gold globe there on the left. You have to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the rays aligned with the background with the globe streaks.

try padding the image borders with space to position it pixel by pixel, ie:

<img src="globe.gif" style="padding:10px 2px 5px 0px;">

for your reference its padding:top, right, bottom, left (clockwise).

in addition, i think there is some css style where you can change the transparency of the image (alpha) do you could get the globe to blend into the background. But i would imaging this isn't compatible across most browsers.

I myself would leave the globe without the transparency, i think its a bit more bold that way.

------------------

Besides using tables and table cells mentioned above, you can also structure the whole thing in css which is very tidy way of building websites, although the learning curve is a bit higher and you have to do alot of browser tweaks, but you can build really slick sites that can load very quickly with very efficient code.

acluckhardt · Sep 25, 2005

Dan · Sep 29, 2005

Coming from a fellow 14 year old webdesigner:

I like the site, but the background images can get distracting. Try a gradient, or a nice solid color instead.
Use CSS to control your fonts, and layout. Tables weren't meant for layouts. They are designed to hold tabular data.
The buttons on the top could be done in CSS. They would be square, however you could save yourself a ton of coding by ditching all of that JavaScript.
Using 3 lines of CSS can save you from needing to put: border="0" on all of your images
Using CSS you could eliminate the need for <font> tags every 10 lines.
Using CSS you could cut the loading time in 1/2.
In your portfolio, you have a side-to-side scroll bar. That is generally looked down upon.

If you have AIM, let me know. I can help you out with some other stuff.

acluckhardt · Sep 29, 2005

acluckhardt · Sep 29, 2005

Dan · Sep 29, 2005

I'll catch you on AIM tomarrow. Time for tonight's homework.

acluckhardt · Oct 12, 2005

Mikey reda · Oct 31, 2005

Alex that is really amazing what you have there- And at 14, you should be very proud of yourself. I really like your style, it really seems to capture nature.
I can relate to some of your problems however- I am 16, and am quite enthusiastic about photography. I have a website www.mikeredaphotography.com .. check it out, see how it measures up! I would like very much to sell some prints online, and spent a long time trying to make this a reality- unfortunately, I simply do not get enough traffic. I would be more than happy to do a link exchange with you though, we would both benefit... On top of the obvious traffic we would bring eahc other, I think search engines rank sites by how many links there are to it... correct me if i'm wrong!
Anyway, see what you think. I will put a link to your site on my links page if you want to trade links.
Good luck with the site!
Mike