New preview pages launched

Today we finished the programming on our new image preview pages. Yipee I hear you cry !!! Ok perhaps not quite yipee, but changes like this shouldn't go unnoticed after 6 years...

The aim has been to make it easier to browse your photos, faster to see them with clearer options laid out, and a more aesthetically pleasing layout. I.e. better !

Improvements we have tweaked and played with include:

1. Clearer colours for web links making navigation easier and more obvious.
   
2. Clearer next/previous and back to thumbnail links.
3. Better listing of products and formats available making it easier to find what you want quickly.
   
4. Only reloading the new image itself on browsing to the next image, not reloading the whole page, saving browsing time.
   
5. Adding a link to the digital samples gallery - so you know what you get for your money !?
   
6. Friendlier watermarking - doesn't have "copyright" written all over it calling you a thief or threatening legal action.
7. A Share button - you can link legally and easily to your favourite social webpage (usually facebook by all accounts), just click on the share button (by AddThis.com) and hey presto all your friends are updated, emailed, tweeted or dug...

There's a screen shot for you below, or of course, go to your latest event and see yourself for yourself ! http://gallery.sussexsportphotography.com

Finally we timed the loading of the first preview page and tested them across three of the most popular web browsers used to look at our pictures. Subsequent pages load faster, this is the inital first view time.

In order of speed, fastest first to load a whole page from nothing :

1. Firefox3: 1.20 sec http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/
   
2. Google Chrome: 1.533 sec  http://www.google.com/chrome
   
3. IE7: 1.809 sec (here if you really do want slow browsing:  http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx)
   

We tend to use Firefox, and would suggest you give it a go !

(please note all theses were tested on a v.fast machine quad thingy on 2meg broadband)

Thanks for visiting, we will continue to try and make things easier and faster for you to see your pictures and try to add interesting and relevant content (like the videos). All comments, suggestions, thoughts and even compliments will be gratefully received.

cheers for now, we are still taking pictures of competitors for competitors, because that's what we do...

Anthony