Thanks Inger, for checking out
my new site, and for posting your helpful comments and advice.
I had somehow overlooked adding descriptions and keywords to the new site's pages. I am glad that you caught that!
I have added some more HTML to each page, in the form of a common menu block, which I hope will help with search engine indexing. (This addition partly duplicates the content of the flash menus that also appear on each page. The search engine authors have been saying for years that their indexing processes are getting smarter about interpreting flash elements, XML files, and so on .. but I for one have yet to see any evidence whatsoever of this.) I know that some pages on my site, including its landing page and home page, still lack real HTML text content. The dilemma is that these pages are intended to showcase images. Do I add text for the sake of adding text, and if so, how do I do it without detracting from the visual impact of a cleanly presented sequence of images?
As for initial page loading speed, I remain in a quandary about this. As a photographer, I believe that it is absolutely vital to get plenty of my images in front of the eyes of my visitors, automatically and often. The flash slideshows that are embedded on my site are now being driven by big specialized third party service providers, and the performance improvement has been noticeable. Beyond the slideshows, I find the flash menu very appealing, and I am hoping that my visitors do too. I am not sure yet about the brief animated text segment that appears when first visiting the site; while I believe that its message is important, I don't want it to cause impatient visitors to steer their browsers elsewhere. Are there simple ways to pep up the performance of embedded flash elements like these, so that they can deliver some extra functional and visual value, without being a burden?
David
David A. Gilmour
Lumacraft Productions