Ooooops.......hit reply to quick on the above response.

Cuechick is correct and they have great CS.
LB is my 3rd website and has paid for itself many times over.
My clients just want to see the images, large and clean.
LB does that.

Richard

I switched to LB this year after using a Photoshop gallery which just sat there. I had a sit down with a senior creative at a major motion picture studio and showed my PS slide show on my laptop, it worked. The problem is the next day an AB and AD tried to look at it online and they had issues and hated it. I went to SB2 this year and switched to LB and hearing the talking points. Very small investment indeed.
Here is a candid quote from one of the creatives when i asked him for his opinion
"....i looked through all three portfolios and i pretty much love every image you have up there. so there's not really many i'd take out, unless you feel that they get redundant. if i looked them over again, there might be a few i'd edit out. either way, i didn't feel that way as i looked at them. i guess then, my only question for you is organization. what i mean by that is it's one thing to organize your portfolios as "portfolio 1, 2, 3, etc." but i wonder for convenience and to indicate range, if you should classify them differently. for example, labeling them things like people, places, portraits, auto, still life, candid, military, etc.... i think it'll wind up being easier for you to know where to put your images as you upload more and more. but perhaps more importantly, it lets the user quickly know what type of stuff you do. equally important, it lets clients see the depth of your range without having to scroll thru shot after shot. and as you know, clients have very short attention spans.. so it's always best to err on getting to the f***ing point quick..."
So you know i had a friendly relationship with him before he was at the studio, so that helped. I am currently working on some edits and changes on my site based on his advise.
Why wouldn't i listen to an industry expert, who also has the power to assign jobs and approve budgets?
Scott
www.scottshepardphotography.com

to be clear, the above quote was talking about my current LB site. i hope this little insight helps someone.

scott
www.scottshepardphotograhpy.com

Thank you Scott, that is very helpful!

A couple of small points. I found the white bikini next to the image of the younger girl a little bothersome.

The bikini is a bit "sexualized". The side-by-side placement with the girls image made me uneasy, like I was looking at "her" white bikini bottom. Very small thing, being hyper sensitive too.

The thumbnails were faily slow to load! I was on Portfolio 2, had to wait quite a while for the thumbnail images to load.

You said you are on Livebooks? Any way to address hosting images and performance with them? That would be an issue for me.

Sorry to rag - thanks again for sharing!! Very useful feedback in the context of looking at your site.

Michael,
thanks for your imput. I am in the process of fixing all of the images on the site. they are test images sized in Light Room 2. as a result they are all 3 times the file size they should be, hense the slow load times. The first 6 or so in port 1 are corrected. they load pretty zippy.I loaded them all on to get a feel for placement and selection( 200 at first) so it is really an ongoing edit. i am trying to get it down to about 30 or so for each portfolio. No reason to prepare every image for the site only to have it not make the cut. By the way the back end of LB is great. i am changing picture and portfolios on the fly. It is very fast and simple.


thanks
scott
wwww.scottshepardphotography.com

on a side note Michael,
what are you connecting with ( dsl,fiber,ect) and @ what speed. also, what browser and screen size are you using.
Thanks
Scott
wwww.scottshepardphotography.com

quote:

Originally posted by cuechick:
[qb] When your consultant says it needs to look like LB maybe what they meant was "function" like.

What many of you seem to miss, is the simple beauty of a LB site, is it's ease of use and it's huge emphasis on the images. It is simple and clean. This is why creatives like it. They can easily see the work and that is the entire point!
The other great function of LB, is the ease of use for me, to up date it.

It is simple, if your site does not function with ease and you can not update it when ever you want, it is not a good tool for your business. [/qb]

hear hear !!!!

well pointed out cuechick

Hi Scott! Thanks for the info.

I am on Comacast cable, their faster link. Supposed speeds up to 12 Mbps. Actual? ....

Both IE 7.0 and Foxfire 2.0 Foxfire loaded the HTML site first until I downloaded the Flash reader.

Foxfire seemed slower. I timed 30+ seconds to load the full set of thumbnails on the 2nd or 3rd "page" of a portfolio.

On my XP laptop at 1280x800.

We used to subscribe to a monitoring service that gave us breakdowns on site loading times for all of the components, and for the internet backbone speeds from 11 locations internationally. Different browsers, OS, etc. Much too expensive for a small site, but you may find tools that give you a one-off reading from different locations - LA, London, Tokyo, etc. just for comparison.

Otherwise your hosting provider should have good stats on the average load time for each page and each object on their end.

Good luck!

Best,
Michael

I wouldn't go as far as saying that Livebooks is what others are imitating.

As Kevin knows, for a software engineer/developer, there are certain "common knowledge" ways to solve a problem. Lets' see - we will have a menu, and there will be a File Open funtion, and a Save function, etc. Microsoft Excel uses the same menu system that Lotus first used in the 1980's.

In the same vein, the Macintosh OS is a version of Unix, a 40+ year old operating system that every major manufacturer uses or has used in some format (Sun, DEC, IBM, etc.) The first GUI for Unix, X-Windows, was implemented in 1985 or thereabouts.

Livebooks is like a couture designer that only sells size 0. Of course the dresses look good - they are high end and are only seen on skinny models and celebrities.

Not to say there is anything wrong with Livebooks. But it starts to become a cult after a while, and it is just not very unique. They have a decent package of interface, admin, and hosting.

But at that price point, it isn't hard to deliver on those features and still make a good profit - witness Rob, et. al. going after the same market at a lower price point using commonly known programming principles. Otherwise Livebooks would be copyright protected, patented, and trademarked, which it is not. (Many software processes are patented today.)

great feedback Michael
thank you,
scott

Anyone with experience with this banner ad on Pdn. Looks real good, atleast to me.
http://www.getparade.com/
Interesting price structure, not that much upfront, but monthly adds up over time.

also the people at photoeye.com now have a service called visual server it looks pretty swell.