Website Makeover 2

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wassabi
 
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Website Makeover 2

Post by wassabi »

Was this old thread moved or deleted? Link is broken.
Google Cache: Website Makeover - Forums - Adafruit


My thoughts on the website changes, it is prettier and I like the clean design and the drop down navigation, but still find the new format harder to navigate. Takes some getting used to and is growing on me.

adafruit
 
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Re: Website Makeover 2

Post by adafruit »

thanks, updating some things now - please stay tuned!

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terryd1
 
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Re: Website Makeover 2

Post by terryd1 »

Hi,

I sent this as an email a month ago but got no reply, so in case it got lost I thought I'd post it.

18 months ago I chanced upon adafruit.com and open hardware, arduino, embedded micros, kits and learning etc. Everything that I liked. You guys are great and have a great philosophy.

Adafruit's site has been a great source of learning, materials and enjoyment for me since I fell ill. I had always loved the layout and found it to be pretty efficient.

When I visited adafruit.com a month or so ago, I was a bit taken aback by the redesign, especially in the use of large images (main image on the page I visited at random (https://www.adafruit.com/products/374) was over 300k in size). The font size chosen is a bit big and has trouble displaying more than two lines of product name on an iPad with the third being cut off mid-line.

My main issue is the total download size for this page. Over 2.2meg!! This will most likely account for the poor performance that at least I experience.

After checking image properties, I found this is largely due to the small ("May we also suggest"...) images at bottom of page being downloaded and then heavily scaled for display.
eg. https://www.adafruit.com/images/480x360/1296-00.jpg is scaled from 480px × 360px to 228px × 171px
132.31 KB (135,483 bytes)

I did a random sampling on a few pages and found that many photos are scaled down by a factor of five

eg
In Firefox
Go to Category 105 Raspberry Pi and scroll down to product 914, Adafruit Assembled Pi Cobbler Breakout and Cable For Raspberry Pi. Right click on the image to the left and select 'View Image Info..' This image is scaled as the following:
480px × 360px (scaled to 230px × 173px) - This is over five times the needed size and is fairly typical of the image sizes. I blew half my mobile download quota on an hour or so of browsing Adafruit's site. And did I say it didn't perform very well on a normal PC and much worse on an iPad?

You have probably already discovered these "problems" ... but just in case you hadn't. These pages can be uncomfortably slow to download sometimes and even more so when on an iPad or tablet that is tethered to a mobile for internet access. Whilst the site itself may take some getting used to, the performance has to get better. I assume the scaled images are so the web page scales to any size screen?


This comes at a heavy price. I was a web developer before I became sick.



I look forward to improvements and developments on the site and in the great kits Adafruit produce. I hope this info is of some help.

One more thing to add... I only just realised how little I have been visiting the site this last month or so. It was almost a daily habit. Weekly is most like it now! I like clean sites, nice piccies too and


my eyesight isn't what it used to be either but this is extreme and a bit off-putting.

Regards

Terry

adafruit
 
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Re: Website Makeover 2

Post by adafruit »

thanks for the post and the feedback!

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antto
 
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Re: Website Makeover 2

Post by antto »

i believe i found a bug in the forum

while i was editing a post of mine, when submitting the changes - the system decided that it contains spam (duh) and required me to enter the "captcha" test..
okay, but the captcha image/editbox .. that whole thing doesn't show up at all

*shrug*

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Website Makeover 2

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll have our web folks look into it.

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