Critique my website?

[fuzzybabybunny]

EDIT 4:

New beige layout.

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/realestate/1438yilufa/

EDIT 3: What do you guys think of this?

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/...state/10450floravista/

I got fed up with that flash viewer. Making it was clunky and people said it took too long to load.

So this is my retry: I exported using a Lightroom Gallery, and then I replaced the Panoramics with Flash versions, so when the user clicks on them it plays as a 3D Panoramic thing instead of a static image.

EDIT 2:

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/...65miramonte/index.html

The only way for me to embed my flash viewer is to use an iframe. I'm trying to get the iframe to dynamically resize to its CONTENTS, and I installed this script to do just that:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dy...index17/iframessi2.htm

The script works awesome. It resizes the iframe on both the flash viewer and the non-flash image gallery perfectly. The only problem is that it doesn't work with IE or Opera.

Firefox: Both flash and non-flash resize correctly.
Safari: Both flash and non-flash resize correctly.
IE 8: Non-flash Correct, Flash NOT correct (squished)
Opera: Both flash and non-flash NOT correct (squished)

I REALLY need this iframe resizing thing to work. Any ideas?

I set the height of the flash viewer (TourWeaver_1665miramonte.html) by defining its height in CSS.

EDIT:

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/...65miramonte/index.html

One big problem is zooming with the scroll wheel. When the mouse is over the scene and the scroll wheel is turned, it zooms the scene AND scrolls the entire page at the same time.

How can I make it so that when the mouse is over the scene, the scrollwheel ONLY zooms the scene and does not scroll the page?

******************

I'm new at this!

Trying to get into real estate photography by providing virtual tours of houses for realtors.

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/...65miramonte/index.html

The space under the "Welcome" message will have property specs and descriptions. The "info" drop down screen will contain descriptions of each room.

The School Info, Map, and mailtos are ghetto because they take the user to a completely different site.

I wish it were slicker

For reference I'm comparing my thing to this:
http://tours.tourfactory.com/tours/tour.asp?t=468861

 

[tfinch2]

The required resolution to view the site is too big. I can't see the navigation links on my 1280x800 laptop without scrolling, which is annoying.

 

[WannaFly]

It's kind of bland, But I assume this will be linked from some other page?

Also, can the "dithering" be nay better on the photos? They look great but the edges of things just seems to always be weird..I cant really describe it.
I agree with tfinch about the navigation.

Also the load time is horrendous...might need a loading icon, I refreshed it a few times thinking it wasnt loading properly.

Also, you might want to deny a directory listing on this directory http://www.victorlinphoto.com/realestate/

 

[Snapster]

I'm also with tfinch2 on the size, navigation on the bottom is a bit counter intuitive to the user when they first see a page, let alone not see it on a smaller screen res.

I'm also not keen on having the a big white panel for an extended period of time whilst the swf loads fully (no indication of loading progress). 60+ requests for that 1 page is very heavy and is harming your load times badly, a couple of 404's, and 1 image which is 2MB is too much and took 45 seconds to fully load. If a user cannot get interested in your site in the first few seconds you've got a hard job keeping them.

 

[Markbnj]

You're right, one of those colors does look like poo. . Anyway, I think you're headed in a not bad direction. I didn't have time to look carefully, but with a few more style elements to break up the broad areas of... poo, it will be pretty appealing.

 

[Ken g6]

Agreed, the file sizes are way too big. You should have a Flash and Javascript-free version of the site with static images of no more than 300K each (preferably 100K or so). Some customers may be in apartments where they can only get dial-up internet.

You also need to size the Flash container to the width and height of the browser window. Can you load a lower-resolution, smaller image to start with, and load higher resolutions if someone zooms in on something, like Google Street View does?

Edit: You also need something that says "Loading..." when switching images in the Flash viewer. Some images aren't loading for me. For instance, on the first load, I clicked the arrow to see the Entrance, and nothing happened. I clicked the Entrance thumbnail, and all that happened was the original outdoor image started spinning slowly.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: tfinch2
The required resolution to view the site is too big. I can't see the navigation links on my 1280x800 laptop without scrolling, which is annoying.

Hmmmm... I have the website set to 80% of the width of the window... no scrolling should be necessary. I'm running 1280x768 with no scrolling. Maybe you viewed an older version of the website?

Originally posted by: WannaFly
It's kind of bland, But I assume this will be linked from some other page?

Also, can the "dithering" be nay better on the photos? They look great but the edges of things just seems to always be weird..I cant really describe it.
I agree with tfinch about the navigation.

Also the load time is horrendous...might need a loading icon, I refreshed it a few times thinking it wasnt loading properly.

Also, you might want to deny a directory listing on this directory http://www.victorlinphoto.com/realestate/

I'll be linked from a real estate listings page, but I agree, it is bland. By the dithering do you mean the twinkling effect when the image is panning? This is a known issue with Tourweaver 4, the thing that I used to create the virtual tour. No way around it as of yet.

Progress bar - I'll put one up.

Loading times - it all loads within 3 seconds for me, but I'm in San Jose and the server's in San Diego. I'll look into smaller files, but it's a balance between file size and being able to keep a good res and details for fullscreen view and zooming in and out of the scene.

How do I deny directory listings?

Originally posted by: Ken g6
Agreed, the file sizes are way too big. You should have a Flash and Javascript-free version of the site with static images of no more than 300K each (preferably 100K or so). Some customers may be in apartments where they can only get dial-up internet.

You also need to size the Flash container to the width and height of the browser window. Can you load a lower-resolution, smaller image to start with, and load higher resolutions if someone zooms in on something, like Google Street View does?

Edit: You also need something that says "Loading..." when switching images in the Flash viewer. Some images aren't loading for me. For instance, on the first load, I clicked the arrow to see the Entrance, and nothing happened. I clicked the Entrance thumbnail, and all that happened was the original outdoor image started spinning slowly.

Uggg, the software I'm using only supports Flash for the virtual tour. I guess I could set up a second non-flash page with just the photos. The software doesn't seem to support the type of resolution loading that google street view does. It's always one res, one file size, no matter if it's full screen, downsized, zoomed in/out, etc.

I'm not sure why the entrance button you clicked wasn't working. Dammit.

 

[KIAman]

Screw the site, that home is beautiful!

 

[SJP0tato]

I agree that it takes way too long to load initially without some kind of progress/timer indicator.

I've spent an extraordinary amount of time looking through online "tour" sites home shopping, and yours (besides the load times) is definitely one of the better I've seen as far as actually SHOWING the home itself. Kudos for that.

One complaint I have is many/most of the "other" sites doing this are very clunky in navigation. Keeping it streamlined will definitely draw more people (or at least me!)

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: SJP0tato
I agree that it takes way too long to load initially without some kind of progress/timer indicator.

I've spent an extraordinary amount of time looking through online "tour" sites home shopping, and yours (besides the load times) is definitely one of the better I've seen as far as actually SHOWING the home itself. Kudos for that.

One complaint I have is many/most of the "other" sites doing this are very clunky in navigation. Keeping it streamlined will definitely draw more people (or at least me!)

thanks. i have to agree that mine does a better job of showing the home than most. i've seen a lot of slick looking tours with horrible pictures... and the interface actually has the user panning within what is basically a single, normal shot, not even a pano of any sort.

i also think my navigation is clunky. thumbnails don't scroll automatically and can't be dragged along. the main picture also can't be dragged. there is no button for resuming a slideshow (only start over) and no buttons to move to the next/previous screen. need to figure this stuff out within the limitations of this tour builder software. sadly the manual is horrible...

 

[SJP0tato]

Originally posted by: fuzzybabybunny
i also think my navigation is clunky. thumbnails don't scroll automatically and can't be dragged along. the main picture also can't be dragged. there is no button for resuming a slideshow (only start over) and no buttons to move to the next/previous screen. need to figure this stuff out within the limitations of this tour builder software. sadly the manual is horrible...

While I agree the navigation might not be perfect, it does exactly what it should from a user's standpoint: Show the house, and give a great wide-angle view based on the thumbnail preview.

Maybe you could start out loading nothing to save time, and just display the thumbnails for people to click on. When I see a house I'm interested in has a preview site I spend maybe 15-20 seconds seeing if it gets me excited about the house. As long as it's possible to see the pictures I don't care if the site automates the slideshow, or has any animation/etc.

Just trying to give an un-biased opinion of a home shopper.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Takes too long to load imo. Lot of people will hit back when a site takes more then 30 seconds to load.

 

[LightningRider]

Long to load, as others have said. Also, I got this error, I'm using Firefox with FlashPlayer10:

Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2035: URL Not Found.

Missing a try { } catch { } somewhere in your Actionscript?

Also, why is it that when I click contact or send to a friend that it opens another tab and then opens my email client? It should simply open the email client if that's the effect you were going for... The site seems buggy in general. You should probably make sure you do some proper testing (test all browsers, several flash versions, etc).

Trying to view Agent Info didn't work for me at all. Also the school info sends me to another website. For something that's part of the main menu, it doesn't seem very professional. I'm not too keen on the design outside the flash either.

Either way, with all the negatives, I think you have a great idea here and if you can just improve on the actual website itself and offer a variety of different homes for viewing, then I think you may really be on to something.

All in all, the implementation of the idea of 3D viewing of homes is very well done in itself (aside from the slowness). The pictures are great and it really gives you a good idea of what the place is like. However the skeleton around the flash is not the greatest looking and the functionality is not great either...

I think if you improve the website and make it something more professional (improve look, fix bugs, improve performance, add professionalism, etc), then you would really have something worthwhile on your hands. Oh, and fix those HTML validation errors .

You might check out something like www.templatemonster.com if you want to get some inspiration for some cool design. I'm not a great web designer like some of the people that have submitted things on that site so seeing these templates and even being able to buy them and use them is a great place to draw some creativity and inspiration from.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I'm working on resizing the thumbs (changes not reflected yet on website) and I'm trying to get a feel for how big it should be.

Original content totaled 15MB. I've resized it down to 7MB. Since there's no incremental loading option and the tour viewer loads all images at once, the user would have to load 7MB from the start. Is this still too big? I'm wary of going smaller because I'm afraid the pics will start looking bad in full screen mode.

1. As for the email link, I have the target set to blank, which is why it opens another tab. I did this because some people like me use gmail as our email client, and gmail just opens in the browser.

2. Yes, the school info sends to another website, but I'm not sure how to integrate it within the website. I mean, I have to pull data from that school info website. Even if I put it in a small popup window it'll still have the formatting from the school website.

3. Agent info is supposed to be broken because I don't have agent info yet.

4. As for showing the site, I'll try making a non-flash version. The thing is that this site will probably be linked FROM a home listings site like MLSListings. That site will have normal images, house specs, etc. No flash.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/...65miramonte/index.html

One big problem is zooming with the scroll wheel. When the mouse is over the scene and the scroll wheel is turned, it zooms the scene AND scrolls the entire page at the same time.

How can I make it so that when the mouse is over the scene, the scrollwheel ONLY zooms the scene and does not scroll the page?

 

[Ken g6]

Resize the Flash area such that the entire thing fits in the browser window vertically. This example seems to work. Then attempts to scroll the page up and down will have no effect. Plus tfinch2 will be happy.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Need halp resizing iframe to its contents

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

New faster layout!

 

[Markbnj]

It loads much faster, and the design is getting cleaner and more useful. From a design standpoint I'm not a big fan of the background color or mixing serif and sans fonts.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: Markbnj
It loads much faster, and the design is getting cleaner and more useful. From a design standpoint I'm not a big fan of the background color or mixing serif and sans fonts.

I didn't even know I was mixing fonts. I'll go back and see what's up. I don't even know the difference between serif and sans.

What kind of background color would be nice? I chose it because it matches the Lightroom automatically generate gallery's color.

EDIT: Changed everything to Sans-Serif. Matches Lightroom, Matches Googlemaps.

 

[Ken g6]

I hate to tell you this, but...
When I first click on one of the full panoramas, only the top of the flash player appears. I can hit F5 to refresh, and it then goes to the correct size, but it doesn't start that way. This might have to do with one of my Firefox plugins, probably either NoScript (which is acting like FlashBlock in this case) or CookieSafe which has cookies turned off for your site. Strangely, I don't have to allow the Flash for a refresh to work; but once Flash is allowed the problem disappears.

Also, with this new Flash viewer, I can't make the room stop spinning. Just clicking on the viewer doesn't stop it like it did with the other one.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: Ken g6
I hate to tell you this, but...
When I first click on one of the full panoramas, only the top of the flash player appears. I can hit F5 to refresh, and it then goes to the correct size, but it doesn't start that way. This might have to do with one of my Firefox plugins, probably either NoScript (which is acting like FlashBlock in this case) or CookieSafe which has cookies turned off for your site. Strangely, I don't have to allow the Flash for a refresh to work; but once Flash is allowed the problem disappears.

Also, with this new Flash viewer, I can't make the room stop spinning. Just clicking on the viewer doesn't stop it like it did with the other one.

I really don't think I can code for every single flash blocking plug in that people have. They're just going to have to turn off their flash plugin for my site, like I do with my own Flashblock. I tested this in Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari, and Opera. It works in all browsers (Opera is a little goofy because the iframe doesn't automatically resize to the picture within).

If you click on the viewer it should stop the rotation. After 5 seconds of idle it goes back to rotating. To toggle rotating click that button that looks like the refresh button on browsers.

 

[Tegeril]

Don't worry about people running Flash blocking scripts. You just can't. Someone who is actually interested in the house will turn it off to see the images. People blocking Flash are in the geek minority and likely aren't your clients anyway. You also can't worry about Opera. Statistically no one uses it and wasting your time on it is like burning money. I will admit I haven't put a lot of looking into it, but it's a very elegant approach compared to -anything- I've seen in the past 2 months of my property searches. Are you using SWFObject to embed Flash?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Originally posted by: Tegeril
Don't worry about people running Flash blocking scripts. You just can't. Someone who is actually interested in the house will turn it off to see the images. People blocking Flash are in the geek minority and likely aren't your clients anyway. You also can't worry about Opera. Statistically no one uses it and wasting your time on it is like burning money. I will admit I haven't put a lot of looking into it, but it's a very elegant approach compared to -anything- I've seen in the past 2 months of my property searches. Are you using SWFObject to embed Flash?

I think I'm using SWFObject.... I just click on "embed flash" in Dreamweaver and embed the damn thing *shrugs*

Now I just need to figure out how to make all this go faster... as of now I have to go into the Lightroom gallery's code and replace the <img src=> with my flash embed code. Ten flash files? I have to go into ten different html pages and replace the code ten times manually. Very time consuming. It would be amazing if I could find some way to automate this...

Is there some kind of script or program that I can run that does, say:

Scans a selection of html files for <img src="images/large/specific_filename1">, selects all the code between and including the <img> and </img> tags, and replaces it with my flash code? And then adds javascript code for swfobject in the body?

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

How's this new color scheme?

http://www.victorlinphoto.com/realestate/1438yilufa/

What do you think of the photos? I'm trying to cater my photography to approach that of Vicaso, which is extremely popular and will be competing with my in the future:

http://vicaso.net/iflyer/1400