Opinions please on my website

@cdw Hi thanks for the input and will revisit it. With them being made in Yorkshire, maybe I should have the strapline as “Made in God’s own country” :+1:

@producerguyaz Thanks Robert for your very kind comments. It did take me a while to get the site to where it is today.
As for the load time, I don’t know how I could improve that (It could also just be down to my Hosting company), however, it is my intention to replace the gallery images in the hero section with an auto-play video of me in my workshop. That might even slow it down, even more, I hope not though.

@rogerb Roger, I’m not sure why it’s behaving like that, on the preview, it works fine but on the live site the links won’t go to the contact page. I think more investigation is required.

Simon

Just for curiosity I imported your site into Sparkle V4 and noticed many of your visual elements are pretty big, some photos larger than 1MB which really isn’t required for a webpage.

If you’re going to upload videos of any kind they too need to be optimized so the files are small but still have good visual quality. Best app for that is HandBrake.

Keep it up.

For someone so young, you have so much wisdom! :rofl: Yes, this blessed land…

@producerguyaz, Very interesting, I will double-check and see about uploading the same images but with smaller file size. I appreciate the little nugget of information regarding the size and the Video, I have used Handbrake in the past. :+1:
@cdw :rofl: :rofl:

I looked closely at the documentation for this as I had previously used ‘Squash’ to shrink images down for importing.
Sparkle documentation states that “Sparkle ‍will ‍resize ‍and ‍recompress ‍the ‍images ‍as ‍needed. ‍In ‍fact ‍it’s ‍probably ‍best ‍if ‍you ‍are ‍generous ‍with ‍the ‍image ‍dimensions ‍and ‍quality.”
I now leave it up to Sparkle but how have you found Sparkle deals with your smaller image sizes?

Although Sparkle does some background optimization, I find it best to prepare any media files to be used for web purposes prior to importing them into the project. This way Sparkle gets fed what it really wants and, there’s no concern for taking up too much space when uploading.

For images already edited that just need resizing I use, “Photobulk” which has various options for sizing, removing metadata etc.

When I edit an image I make sure the final output size, regardless of dimension is less than 1MB, whether it’s a standard JPEG or a with an alpha-background PNG. I use Pixelmator Pro but any image editor is capable.

Update: I forgot to mention - Apple’s Preview app can now create Alpha-PNG’s (transparent background) so no need for an external app outside MacOS.

For audio files that need proper compression for web I use OcenAudio and output high-quality, low-latency MP3’s.

For video as mentioned earlier, I take the final video file and make a web-specific compressed output from HandBrake.

While it’s more cumbersome to use multiple tools to create your media you’re also in full control of quality and sizing which makes things ideal for web publishing.

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@producerguyaz Hi Robert, I don’t know if you want to try my site now, I have reduced all the image sizes and I do think it is a big improvement on speed. :+1:
Simon

It is a huge improvement, I’d say probably the best you’re going to get considering all the animations that need to load.

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I just flipped the text into Google Translate, showing RESPECT for contributor who took the time to help. “Respect to others” is a 2-way street.