I think I can guess.

However, I know that most of my clients don’t want to wade through pages of loading flash to find what they are looking for. On the other hand, I must admit that Photoshelter Personal Archive leaves a great deal to be desired in the presentation department – especially when I want to share new story packages with editors.

Boogle@34 – When considering Search Engine Optimization, it can matter a lot to those of us who make our living through stock image sales – especially if we have unique specialties. (Dan Heller has some excellent analysis on the subject). So far, the only major drawback to good placement is the weekly “I want to take pictures like you – please explain your technique” email.

http://www.durmphoto.com

A Flash site can, obviously, obtain good search engine rankings as well, but it becomes much more important to get good links to your site, as you typically can’t have any part of an actual Flash movie crawled by search engine spiders, thereby making keywording, and other methods useless.

Boogle @34, I wouldn’t care how my clients found me, as long as they find me, and they’re the clients I’m looking for. If I get a client through a search engine, it’s no more inherently worse, or better, then one I get from an email blast, or referral, or anything else.

Many photographers couldn’t care less about search engine rankings, as they don’t get their clients through search engine placement, while others rely fairly heavily on search engine listings.

Different businesses have different needs, and if something works for someone, I’m not going to knock it.

The only reason I’d want a Search Engine is if somebody just remembered maybe my last name, and they Googled that with the word “photographer”, or something. But if the success of your business is predicated on “people photographer, New York City”, (probably producing ten thousand results), you’ve got some much larger issues in setting your work apart from the masses.

I’ve never understood the whole fear of Search Engines thing.

You can have Flash AND rank high in the search engines. FWIW, my site is not a LiveBooks site.

Cheers,
Blake Discher
http://www.fireflystudios.com
http://www.go-seo.com

Cowart – Always one of my favorites

Pifer – extra double annoying.

And this is a great site?

I like your eye for good work, but you must be blind…

brook-pifer.com — solves the resolution problem by loading large images filling the browser window in width/height with Flash; adds to load time, also note the lack of vertical images

quick question on this subject.

for yourself and/or with conversations with other art buyers, would you say that a slower website just kills the mood? slower being a long loading, flash site. (unless they are a major player in the industry or you are somewhat familiar with their work) Or will you actually wait because it’s more important (for you) to check out the images?

i know there are a lot of factors involved – i usually won’t wait, but as a photographer, my interest obviously differs from yours. curious to hear the busy PE’s point of view is on this.

thanks yo.

justin

Most browsers do not manage color (Safari on Mac being a notable exception), subsequently they ignore embedded ICC profiles, resulting in photos that tend to look “washed out,” especially in the reds and yellows. Flash, on the other hand, does manage color and honors embedded profiles, resulting in photos being accurately rendered within the .swf. This is one case where the encapsulated nature of flash files turns out to be an advantage.

I think it doesn’t even matter how good your site is if you’re an established photographer. But for emerging photographers a good site is a sales tool, just like a gallery in a popular part of town it will help you sell if it’s easy to find the work.

2ROB: I think the reason why you like photos in flash so much more is because of their appearance, such as animation and smoothness that adds some life to it, while HTML is very still, where images are on the walls and there is almost no interaction.

@12 Gordon is of like mind. I err on the side of speed so as not to loose the audience. It would probably make sense to give an option to launch an new window with a full screen image but to force a long load time is risky.

this brings the problem of aspect ratio and being limited by monitor height – since i (and most others) typically use my monitor in the landscape position, designs like the above favor landscape images, making them larger than portrait orientation since they kept a constant height throughout. guess that’s okay if targeting a magazine p.e. since a magazine has the same limitation/ feature – although folks seem to be okay w/ turning some magazine pages 90 degrees to address the orientation issue (playboy) ;-)

would be interested in seeing some web designs that you like where they kept the image size (area) identical between images (square images doesn’t count) ;-)

After first building my site with a Flash interface I got so many emails saying that they had issues, their browser wouldn’t load it (Explorer) the link would just show up broken, etc. I scrapped the whole thing and redesigned it in HTML and guess what? It’s actually better looking and way easier to update.

A big Thanks to you, Rob for providing the invaluable info within this blog. It’s a must see in my daily RSS.

The usability problem seems to not effect these people. They’re all top travel photographers.

The flash vs. google problem is not an issue since I google’d all of them to get the links and for the most part they all came out on top.

http://christopherwilsonphotography.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=7931&Akey=MNEGM7X3

This one is a foliolink

Busy people want content quick and with minimal effort. If you are so well known, published regularly in Lürzer’s, or featured in CommArts, then your website can probably be anything you want it to be. Those lesser of us need to be more accommodating.

Flash can be done clean and simple. However, if it really is a clean and simple design, why not have the designer use HTML? At what point is the interface design more important than the images? . . . . I think never.