10 comments

  • Tim Resudek, 7 years ago (edited 7 years ago )

    Overall a really nice, original look. A couple of thoughts:

    1. Same as everyone else, it took a really long time to load and that is the easiest way to get visitors to bounce. Optimize in every way possible to reduce this.

    2. I found it difficult to orient myself. The navigation is a little subtle and the frames of each work sample make it hard to tell if they are one project or unique projects unto themselves. My recommendation would be to flip your interactions; that is to make the projects go vertically (and avoid the fixed scrolling) and then make the left-to-right navigation for from project to project. Seems a much more logical way to view it.

    3. Within the project "pages" please keep some things consistent, like the header and footer. With each part of the "page" changing it loses flow for me. If you change the direction of the navigation (see above) this probably won't be such an issue.

    4.Open up the site with some context about you. DO NOT include a photo or illustration of yourself but tell me who you are, where you are in your career, and what you're looking for. I expect to see this straightaway.

    1. Run everything through spell check and then have a friend look it over. In my quick look I caught a misspelling of "Brief". Spelling errors are the worst.

    All the best!

    1 point
    • Matthew McVeigh, 7 years ago

      Thanks very much for your thoughtful response. And thanks for waiting for the site to load!

      1.a) Trying out a coupe of things to fix this.

      2 + 3.) Interesting thought. I'll implement and A/B test

      4.) I always get a mixed response to "how do I introduce the portfolio". Some people like that you pepper in some personality to kick things off. Most CD's I talk to don't care and think it's very "junior". They will get to know you in the interview. As such, I'm content with leaving the extra stuff at the end. But I will take time to build that out instead of showing a dumb picture.

      1.b.) I am the worst at spelling. I spend too much time looking between the letters to actually read them. Apologies!

      Cheers

      0 points
  • Riomar MccartneyRiomar Mccartney, 7 years ago (edited 7 years ago )

    The website took 2min to load.. Dribbble takes me only 5sec even tho my slow internet. But very nice work!

    1 point
  • John Reed, 7 years ago

    Took a long time to load for me

    1 point
    • Rhys MerrittRhys Merritt, 7 years ago

      Same here.. about 20-30 seconds.. Really sorry dude but if I'm waiting for more than 3 or 4 seconds, I'm usually on to the next thing already. This load time is kryptonite to potential employers

      2 points
  • Matthew McVeigh, 7 years ago

    Applying to jobs and would like a some advice on the following:

    1.) Image optimization: I am supporting both retina and standard sized images. But the @2x images are really doing a number on load time. Would love to hear your thoughts/practices on that. I am currently detecting the pixel ratio in the css and if it is standard 1:1 then i "display:none" on the @2x image.

    2.) I am wondering if it is worth describing so much of the process for each case study. I feel like I am not saying too much in the UX sections. Would more hero shots of the UI serve the story better?

    Thanks very much. I welcome any other thoughts you might want to share.

    1 point
    • Calum SmithCalum Smith, 7 years ago (edited 7 years ago )

      Images

      1. It looks like this way loads both images every time, which takes a long time and over-complicates things. Use imgs with srcset and sizes to let the browser automatically select the source by density—support is great by now, and you can select them by more specific criteria than density, like the size of the image.
      2. They don't all need to be PNGs. A whole bunch of them don't have any transparency, and could just as easily be high-quality JPEGs. It might mean a couple artifacts, but not much, and easily worth it; worst-case, JPEGs can be lossless too.
      3. I didn't check, but I suspect the images would do well to be run through ImageOptim or similar a couple times.

      Scrolling

      I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but scrolljacking. I had a tough time navigating the site, and at one point couldn't actually scroll at all. If you ask me, use scroll-snap points for browsers with experimental support, and leave it be in others.

      Oh, and it's spelled "brief" ;)

      1 point
      • Matthew McVeigh, 7 years ago

        Dude thanks for the tips! I am the worst at spelling so thanks for jumping on that.

        Your first point is exactly what i needed! That, mixed with some swapping for JPEGS and ImageOptim should do wonders for that load time.

        Since everyone hates scrolljacking with a passion, I'm going to try a new layout. No point in selling people on something they are not buying.

        0 points
        • Calum SmithCalum Smith, 7 years ago (edited 7 years ago )

          I think this layout can still work without scrolljacking, honestly, particularly if you include scroll-snap points. Since they're handled by the browser, they don't have the same problems with performance and feeling non-native.

          0 points