Want to critique my personal blog site?

[richiezh]

I am new to the world of web development, in fact I started it as a little hobby of mine less than a year ago. I currently have a blog which I post photos onto occasionally. I designed the entire site from scratch, and am hoping if anyone can critique its design or give me some advice to make it better.

Here it is: http://www.richiezhangblog.ca/

Again, I would appreciate any musings or advice on the design, or the site as a whole.

 

[proje129]

Well the design is flawless, I love it, maybe a bit too professional almost as if you used a template or site builder of sorts but it's ok, the only main gripe I have about the site is that it is a bit slow at loading, which just screams site builder to me site builder but besides that good work, also nice pc tear down.

 

[richiezh]

Well the design is flawless, I love it, maybe a bit too professional almost as if you used a template or site builder of sorts but it's ok, the only main gripe I have about the site is that it is a bit slow at loading, which just screams site builder to me site builder but besides that good work, also nice pc tear down.

Thank you! I hand coded the entire site without using a sitebuilder, and I think it's a bit slow because the images are pretty high-res. I will look into fixing the speed problem in the future.

 

[caftpx10]

Little tip: use your browsers developer tools. In the network tab, when reloading, it would show the download times along with what's requesting what, the content, data type, size, and the time it takes to send/recieve.

 

[richiezh]

Little tip: use your browsers developer tools. In the network tab, when reloading, it would show the download times along with what's requesting what, the content, data type, size, and the time it takes to send/recieve.

Thanks! I will look into that.

 

[bdistler]

and I think it's a bit slow because...

12.9 MiB download for your 'landing' page - might be why it takes five (5) seconds to load

see --> [ http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bUISjt/http://www.richiezhangblog.ca/ ]
click on [ Test Now ]
and try some of the servers under [ Settings ]

 

[proje129]

12.9 MiB download

12.9MiB? Wow I didn't even take that into consideration he said it was handoded so I assumed...

 

[ajstetson17]

It seems like one of the main reasons that your webpage is loading slowly is due to the large page size, as mentioned above. Upon further inspection, I noticed that the pictures on the site are very large. For example, the header image is 4159 x 2239 pixels, which is huge for a website. Most of the other images are also very large too. These need to be downsized (in quality), as it makes the webpage huge, slowing down your website.

 

[Zenax]

Quite a nice website, clean and functional, does the job its intended to do. Not sure if it has been fixed yet, but the issue of slow loading images can be sorted in a few ways. One is obviously to reduce image size and the second is to use something called Lazy Loading of images. It basically doesn't download an image until it has entered the viewport of the browser, hence creating a faster loading time for the page.

All in all a good layout and design style.

 

[shameers]

hi,
Website is simple and good looking..

regarding the image file size issue you can use below sites to reduce the same without loosing it's quality....

simple steps upload, check quality of output and download...
jpeg formate files:- http://www.jpegmini.com/main/shrink_photo/

for png formate file (no previews available you need to download and check quality)
https://tinypng.com/

Reduce file size and update site

 

[caftpx10]

Little tips when it comes to PNG file size and speedy requests....

I use http://compresspng.com/ (lossy) first and THEN https://tinypng.com/ (loseless).
In order, they're very effective in decreasing the file size by a crazy amount.