I would appreciate your feedback on Photawe Pre-launch

Discussions
#21

Denial phase see I.

Passion is very unspecific. Awesome is very unspecific too.

Imagine me coming to your site and seeing your tag line. Or, better yet, me noticing it on some girl’s t-shirt. Or a bus. Will I be able to grasp instantly what is that you’re doing and how are you special, so I rush to my browser to get to your site ASAP? Nope. It could mean fokking anything, so I won’t even bother.

As such, this tagline - IMHO, all IMHO - is nothing more than a waste of space and a visitor’s attention saturation.

#22

Got it, it’s not set in stone. I will clearly pay attention to what our users and conversion rate will say. If this is not good enough - I will change it (as I changed my original tagline, which was different). Thanks for the feedback!

#23

Yes, that sounds better to me. Makes me wonder what the “awesome experience” might be, so I’d take a closer look at your product, which is precisely what you want. :slight_smile:

#24

Impressive work. But there are nits that are easy to fix

1\ All webpages have a loading indicator and take 6.3 seconds to load on fast desktop (per chrome dev tools).

Not sure if you just wanted to be cute or is it because you think it’s necessary but no software marketing website shouldn’t make the user wait seconds to display useful information.

Your no 1 client is Google’s spider. He likes his pages fast, with meaningful text.

In the worst case cutesy loader animations, unnecessarily dynamic text etc. can prevent your site from indexing.

A page should load in under a second. This is a perf report for your page. https://www.webpagetest.org/result/180528_YH_089ee875bdfd1d15fa183bf598c97457/

It’s fine to add cutesy animation here and there but remove the in-your-face “revealing my page on startup” animation.

2\ Optimize your pages, especially your pngs. https://phot-awe.com/features/ loads 17 MB, of which 6.5 MB is a GIANT, unoptimized png. Make them of reasonable size and run through optipng.

According to https://webspeedtest.cloudinary.com/results/180528_YH_089ee875bdfd1d15fa183bf598c97457 you could reduce the size by 98% by reducing sizes, using the best format and optimizing.

3\ https://phot-awe.com/features/ looks empty on load.

Again, it’s the “cutesy animation syndrome”. The screenshots “animate in” on scroll but on initial load the page just looks broken.

4\ Keyword SEO 101

I doesn’t look like you’ve picked keywords you want to rank high in Google and did something to help with that.

Most of what I wrote in Ideas to increase license sales applies to your website.

5\ Online services support.

I would think that in this day most people with lots of photos keep then on Flickr/smugmug/Google Photos/Facebook/iCloud.

Consequently I would expect direct support for them would be desired feature. Based on docs there’s nothing of such kind.

Final advice: apps for end users are hard. This is Picasa, which I used many years ago but only because it was free.

Clearly you can write high quality software.

Write something related to jobs, not hobbies.

It’s much easier for someone to justify spending $80 on a tool that helps them do their job (expense accounts!) than to justify spending $20 on photo organizer.

I’m certain that if you’ve spent similar amount of time on a good git client (my favorite example), you would be making good money from it.

1 Like
#25

To use a very unspecific word, “awesome” :smiley:
Thanks!

#26

Hi @kjk,

First off, many thanks for the detailed feedback!

1/2. Damn. In Romania, it loads MUCH faster :smiley: Anyway, you got a really good point - need to talk to my web programmer and make that loading time waaaaay faster!
3. Indeed, need to fix that too
4. Yes, the website was created a while ago, and I changed the tagline/description since then - thus, need to update :slight_smile:
5. It’s on my todo list - i expect to have something ready within 1 - 1.5 months. The idea is that I want to make it awesome :slight_smile: - that is, integration with cloud needs to be “WOW” :slight_smile: Then, I’ll tell people about it :slight_smile:
6. I’m looking to find a niche that will want to pay for this (it may be photographers, in the end) - it may be hard, but worth it in my view. I wanted something that I would enjoy using - and there was nothing out there. Assuming there’s interest, there are quite a lot more things I will add that people may want to pay for (for instance, I just did a research on collage apps)

Thanks again for the feedback!

#27

Note: it doesn’t work like that. Not in the modern web. We’re so overloaded with “Awesome!”, “Cool!”, “Fantastic!” and other forced emotions that our brains filter them out just like our eyes filter out the banners.

The way to capture visitors’ attention is to be specific and to the point; if you show that you solve THE problem they have, they’ll click. Nobody clicks on “Awesome” because it says “Awesome”; rather, we expect it to be a lie and a marketing ploy.

#28

I do understand what you mean. But “awesome” goes hand in hand with our presentation video. If it won’t work, time will tell.

#29

I got it down to roughly 4.9s (the main page). The features page loads in roughly 11.5s (from US), we’ll figure out improving it. In my tests, the page loads way faster, because the pngs load as the page shows. Anyway, we’ll improve :slight_smile:
About 3. and 4. - still to do :slight_smile:
Thanks again!

#30

I’ve been watching the improvements on your site over the last week or so. It is much better now. As they say, “show, don’t tell”. When I first saw your home page, it was “tell” Now, the home page video (shot in Cluj, right?) is doing a great job of showing.

However, the video is way too long. I’d recommend 90 seconds max. It currently takes 50 seconds into the video before you even hint at what your product is. Edit, edit, edit. Cut, cut, cut. People on the web have extremely short attention spans. They’re always a click or tab away from leaving your site. So get your message across before they’re gone.

The page loading animation is pointless. The pages should be shown much faster. I’m using 300 Mbps fibre optic - there is no reason why I should wait more than 1 second before seeing useful info, but currently, it takes several seconds. Speed, speed, speed. Your site is a static marketing site. Technically this means it should faster than 95% of all websites. This is important for not losing fickle website visitors, and, allegedly, for pleasing the great God Google in website ranking.

I agree with others that you’ll have a really hard time making this product work financially if you aim at general consumers. Perhaps, though, you could aim at hobbyists who spend lots of money on cameras?

#31

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the feedback!

  1. Yes, the video is shot in Cluj, and thanks :slight_smile:
  2. You’re probably right about the video - I will talk to my photographer to take another stab at it.
  3. You’re totally right about the loading animation - that was something we got when we bought the theme :smiley: I’ve just talked to my web developer, and I hope to have it down to 1s or less (tomorrow).

It may be that I will have to aim at photographers/hobbyists. It may be a dream, but I’m hoping to win you over with the ease and simplicity that our app give you.

For instance, take zoom:
Once you enter zoom mode, just hover over the Current Photo, and it zooms. But you can change the Current Photo, or the current page, or both - and hover again -> and it just zooms.
You can enter full screen - if you’re in zoom mode, it zooms. You can change the Current Photo while in full screen, and it still zooms.
You can choose Effects View, and and you can still zoom to see how the effects are applied. In fact, right click on the Current Photo while zooming, and you will see the original photo (before the effects were applied) + zoomed (before effects were applied). Release the right click, and you’re back zooming the Photo with the effects on.

In addition, by default, the zoomed are does not interfere with the rest of the Photo (it does not overlap).

This is what we aim to do with all of our features.

#32

I’ve got them waaay faster. Especially the main page - right now, for me it’s instant. I did another test with webpagetest.com, and it loads in roughly 4s from US. But it seems for a decent computer, where Chrome can go crazy optimizing loading content, it loads pretty much instantly. Please, when/if you have the time, do another test. Thanks!

1 Like
#33

It’s better but still not good. For /features/ page: 37 requests, 5.8 MB, 9.34 sec total, 3 secs until dom loaded.

Concrete suggestions:

1/ Put https://www.cloudflare.com/ in front of it

2/ inline .css in html

3/ use of external .woff fonts is gratuitious. There are good looking fonts that come with the browser and external fonts delay first paint.

4/ more image optimization. e.g. logo-light.png is 1112 x 273 image that is shown as 162 x 40 logo. It doesn’t need to be bigger than that. And since it’s a simple graphic, it could be 1k vector svg

Same for counter_soft*.png

features.jpg is 115kb that adds very little to the page. Only part of it is shown as a background. You can replace is with some 1kb repeated texture.

5/ there’s maybe 1kb worth of JavaScript sent as 100kb+ of javascript. Hand code the wanted effects in plain javascript, no need for jquery. Then inline that javascript in .html

You can run perf audit in Chrome and fix the issue they point out:

35%20PM

#34

You’re right, we’re still not there yet. The “/” was paramount. We’ll gradually optimize more and more - I just wanted to make sure the main page is really fast to load. There’s clearly more to do :slight_smile: - we’ll look to address all the issues you’ve shown us here.

#35

This looks like an awesome idea! Wasn’t aware of it - so will certainly explore this. Thanks!