Abingdon Rose Antiques

[oheso]

I've been helping my buddy Joe (who introduced me to FQ!) on a site for his wife to sell antique china in Japan:

http://abingdonrose.ocnk.net/

She's really found an amazing collection of beautiful china.

The website is a package deal from a service provider here in Japan and covers all the details of credit cards, check-out, gathering the shipping information, etc., as well as aggregating her stuff for Yahoo and eBay auctions and the company's own aggregate on-line store.

I provided some work on the graphics and style sheet, and a little bit of javascript work to get the images on the product pages to behave the way we wanted them. Joe's wife, Noriko, is doing all the product photography herself and -- after a bit of a rocky start -- is doing a great job of it.

[Wassercrats]

It takes a long time to load and it's very slow when I scroll down. I'm on DSL. Maybe it's my computer.

[oheso]

Wassercrats, sorry about that! It takes two seconds here. It could very well be a bottleneck called the Pacific Ocean. (The service is only concerned with the Japanese market, so it doesn't bother with content distribution systems like akamai et al.)

[Andilinks]

Loads fine in Texas, so it's not the Pacific bottleneck, maybe it's the East River pinch point…

A cool site, the English version work fine, translations always make me smile. Thanks.

Originally Posted by oheso

Wassercrats, sorry about that! It takes two seconds here. It could very well be a bottleneck called the Pacific Ocean. (The service is only concerned with the Japanese market, so it doesn't bother with content distribution systems like akamai et al.)

I think your images can go on a diet. This little original thumbnail at:

http://abingdonrose.ocnk.net/data/ab...0031323000.png

weighs in at 25K. We got it down to under 5K in Photo Shop.

I would have included it but I believe this forum does not allow image attachments as when I click on insert image it asks for a URL instead of asking for the location of the image to upload to the forum.

[squillo]

Maa, kirei desu ne. Yoku dekimashita. It's loading fine for me, but then, I'm on the near side of the East River. This is the kind of shop I tried to get my wife interested in setting up, but with no success.

[Wassercrats]

The images use way too much memory for their size. That's what's causing my scrolling to be slow. Nothing to do with location. Firefox says "Images (63 files) 1302 KB." I think over a megabyte is too large for a webpage.

[oheso]

The translation is giving me a giggle, too. Sherry = Shelley, Site Marker = Marcasite, Sherukameo = Shell Cameo, etc.

Sorry about the size of the thumbnail images. Unfortunately those are created by the web application from the larger images we upload (if you click on any of those thumbnails you'll see the larger size). We don't have the option of creating our own thumbnails for upload.

[Tom E.]

Does the upload app have the option to save the thumbnails as jpg instead of png?

In general, photographic images compress much better with jpg.

- Tom

Originally Posted by oheso

The translation is giving me a giggle, too. Sherry = Shelley, Site Marker = Marcasite, Sherukameo = Shell Cameo, etc.

Sorry about the size of the thumbnail images. Unfortunately those are created by the web application from the larger images we upload (if you click on any of those thumbnails you'll see the larger size). We don't have the option of creating our own thumbnails for upload.

Can you contact the developer of the software and point this weakness in the app? It is a terrible waste of bandwidth and not a good user experience.

You can always create a macro in Photo Shop and batch convert the thumbnails to a decent size.

Shameless self promotion:

Look at one of our pages and see some of the banners which are much bigger in display size compared to your little thumbnail but weight in at about 8K:

http://www.belize.com/miss-piel-dorada-belize.html