www.studio25.ro

**octtavyan** · 08-11-2006, 07:05 AM

Ok, so what do you think of Studio25 - Free Pictures - Home it is a free image bank, the platform is mambo, but modified a lot to have the photo gallery work the way we wanted it to. Suggestions about improuving the website?

**Skorpija** · 08-11-2006, 10:06 AM

Looks nice.

I would do the "Login Form" above the "Free Photo Gallery" part.

Further it is not clear for me what benefits it would give me to create an account with you?

**octtavyan** · 08-11-2006, 10:50 AM

The website is intended as a "image share" website, the image rights belong to their owners, they are not transfered to the website or to the user.
Basicly is a proffesional image bank, anyone can contribute, and anyone can download.

**atomico** · 08-11-2006, 01:45 PM

I love the clean web 2.0 design; The site also loads quickly which is a plus!

I hope this isn't off topic, but would you like a link exchange with your site? Please PM me

**mmmwowmmm** · 08-11-2006, 03:01 PM

The enlarged "pop up" images - the ones that pop up when you hover the
thumbnail - they always appear above the cursor, which chops their tops
off unless you have scrolled the thumbnail to the bottom of the page first. They should instead pop up relative to the page's current position. They should also pre-load. I know of a script that will do this, so pm me, I'll direct you to it.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but: Check your site with a screen resolution of 800 x 600. Visitors should not have to scroll horizontally to use your site. You should set your widths by a percentage, not pixels. That way the screen will adjust itself to the user's screen, regardless of their screen resolution.

The logo in the top left corner should click back to the home page. Everyone will expect it to, and it makes it easier to navigate.

I'm not sure why you need my street address for the sign-up. This is unusual... also it demanded my city, but not my state, but then my country. It seems pointless to know someone's street address if you don't know what state they are in. So I just made up a street name ("Maui Waui Way", heh heh)...

Also, in the sign up process, this line appears:
"Specify a valid email address needed for the activation of your account. Please do not use spam-protected email."

Dude. That's going to freak people out. You really have some problems with the whole sign-up process. Usually an email is enough.

All that aside, I feel that this is a site worthy of my "Favorites" folder. I love the concept, and it is set up in a very intelligent way. I'd seriously consider making the sign-up process much, much easier, and fix the widths to a percentage so the 22% of 800 x 600 folks don't have to scroll horizontally. Oh, and make that logo clickable. Oh, and pm me for that JS, if you want.

**octtavyan** · 10:49 AM

Ok, thx for the script, I know it, it pretty much does what ours it's doing. We do not need to pre-load the images because the moment an image is uploaded , the server creates 2 more images, a thumbnail, and a bigger image, the one you see on the hover, and also when you click the thumbnail in the image details page.

If we would have preloaded the images, the page with the thumbnails would take a very long time to load, and it is not a viable option, better to load the hover image only when you realy want to see an image. People sometimes would browse many pages before hovering to see the bigger image of some thumbnail.

The website was intended to run for some time and be improved also during this time, and from our statistics, people who use 800x600 and 640x480 toghether are only 5%, so the compromise was made because we nedeed a lot of space for display purposes.

The "SPAM" protected email it just sound bad, but we did'nt find any other way to say it, many times we send the activation code and it just gets send to spam folder and the users complain that they did not receive it, that is why the explenation.

Any way it needs a lot of improuvements, we are working on the structure, for a better admin for users, and a "reason of rejection" for images, right now if we decide not to approuve an image the users can't know that. It really needs a lot of work.

We also are planning on moving outside of mambo, it turn out to have a lot of bugs we keep fixing....

**mmmwowmmm** · 08-12-2006, 06:03 PM

I see what you're saying about the preloaded images. It would still be nice if the pop ups were automatically displayed inside the users screen, instead of above the cursor, but I'm not a java guy, so I wouldn't know how to alter the script for that.

Perhaps, for the SPAM thing, you could just say something like "be sure to check your "spam" folder for the reply" - I've seen lines like that before that made sense.

I suppose that your particular audience - probably a lot of "graphics" oriented people - would be more likely to use a higher screen rez, so if it's only %5 that are using the 800 x 600, then I guess I wouldn't worry about it either.

**bretrichter** · 01:57 AM

Clean. I like.