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This is a recent site done for a client. It is a modification of Minimum 2.0
http://www.micheleuncorked.com
Nice job - I especially love the wine bottle rings and spills at the bottom of the screen - nice touch! 🙂
Ha! Hi Lizzy. I did a search for "Minimum" and landed this post. I went and look at the site.. and I LOVED it. The whole time I didn't know it was you because the search doesn't return your avatar in the list. I only realized it was you when I came to post about how much I liked the site!
You, my friend, are my mentor. Don't forget that. Hugs.
However, I had already planned to overlay text and a signup over the main banner image. I'm not biting that off you. Lol. But, I have to say, that little folding page thing to the top right is awesome. I would've not thought of that myself! Genius.
I need to talk to you about featured and banner images. I'm taking a different approach on RW. Minimum is tricky when it comes top banner and feature images. I see you don't actually use any. But I think I found my solution. -Danny
Great looking site, and the owner looks like a lot of fun.
But is it just me or is the quality of that photo not good.
Oh my gosh - I didn't realise I had so many replies here.
@Susan - thank you. The wine glass rings are since I learned about brushes in Photoshop. Slow or what? I can't put them down now.
@Charles - Thank you.
@Danny - How could you not know that was me! Danny this site was built by our new plugin which you know I want you to be part of. I am struggling terribly with the website for it though as although the plugin is brilliant (even though I say it myself), I can't quite find a way to explain it to people. Once I've got my head around it that I'd like to speak to you. All I can tell you so far is that people who have used it in beta testing love it.
@SP65 - You are not wrong. The quality of the photo is very low. It was better, but when I showed the site to Dan Thies (no less) he told me the image was too heavy. He says that heavy images like that do a lot of damage to the site in Google. So we reduced it. In fact Dan reduced it. It's an issue as sites nowadays - like this one - demand large images. That site is on Incapsula so in other ways it performs well.Liz
Hi Lizzy, looking forward to the info...
Putting all else aside however, I have to disagree about the image comment. Yes, heavy images are a problem, but it's not the dimensions, it's the file size that's the problem.
While I refuse to run images this big on every post on my minimum site, I don't see it being a problem on the homepage, so long as you save it correctly. You might be doing this already, I don't know. But here it goes anyway...
Always, always, always save your images using Photoshop's "Save for Web." The image file size reduction is VAST compared to any other method I know of. I recommend saving JPEG's at 70% quality. Go up if you can afford to, go down if you have to. But, I usually don't save more compressed than 60%.
Using Save for Web, I get the large homepage image to be about 250Kb. And really, for an image that big, that's not bad at all. That same image saved as a compressed JPEG without using save for web would likely end up at 800kb, give or take. Very bad. So, always... use "Save for Web".
AND, if you ever modify an already optimized image and just hit "save", the file size will jump up from 250kb to 800kb on an image like this, for example. So always modify a source master image, and "save for web" and overwrite your previously optimized image.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU... I'll be here all week 😉
Danny - thanks .... we had that home page image down to about 180K or something like that - via "save to web" like you say. But I was showing the site to Dan really to demonstrate the effect of Incapsula but he got interested in the file weight of the image and said it was way too big. He saved it to be about 62K arguing that the image was fuzzy to begin with so why not reduce the quality way down. Dan would not agree that 250K is OK for an image.
In my membership site (The Genesis Club) I have a photographer who I think it would be fair to say, could not give a stuff about what Google may think, she is never going to let her images go onto a webpage without a decent amount of quality. It's just too important for her. It's her Art and a reflection on her.
Whereas an SEO expert and technician like Dan is going to be motivated by web page marketing, rankings, user experience and the damage a slow page will do to those things. Horses for courses and all that.
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