New Chaser Page

[Mike Mezeul II]

Hi everyone,

My name's Mike Mezeul II and I have just recently joined Stormtrack. I just wanted to let everyone know that there is a new storm chasing web page up. It is www.stormphoto.net. This is my chase team's web page. It was founded by chaser Ken Fugate and managed by yours truly. Chaser Scott Peake also does our video productions. We have been working really hard to get it uploaded and get some publicity, so if you wouldn't mind taking a look at it and giving us some feedback in our Guest Book, we'd greatly appreciate it! Best of luck this season and God Bless.

~Mike Mezeul II

 

[Skip Talbot]

There are some stunning photos on there. You guys should be getting some good business.

 

[Andrew Geil]

Forget the pictures,

I want to know how you conned someone into giving you a free hotel room with wifi for a few hours. Thats a skill we all need. :-D

 

[Mike Mezeul II]

Andrew,

Lets just say it was a cute clerk and i tried to work a bit of charm :wink: ...either that or she saw i needed a shower real bad! lol Thanks for the support you guys!

p.s. dont forget to sign the guest book!

 

[Kurt Hulst]

Mike nice site but one suggestion that was also made to me. The thunder sound its up to you but you might want to take it off. I had something simular on my site and as im suggesing it to you it was suggested to me. One many people listen to music as they surf as i was and well it freaked me out for a second because my music was blasting. And every time i came back to the home page booooooommmm. Got some what annoying.

Other than that its a good site.

 

[Andy Wehrle]

Nice site (although I'm inclined to agree with Kurt about the sound effects thing). Looking forward to reading the rest of the chase accounts. Added a link to the May 29th account to my high-risk day page http://sphs.angeltowns.net/insanity/recent...thighrisk2.html .

 

[David Drummond]

Yeah ditch the sound. I have a download manager, so when I go there, the 3 windows of my download manager pops up. :shock:

Other than that, things look great! :wink:

 

[George Tincher]

Welcome to the site and thanks for the link.

-George

 

[cedwards]

One thing you may want to consider. Your thumnails on the page are actually larger images. This takes up more of your bandwidth, and takes longer for people to load in. You may want to resize the images to the actual size they are displayed on the page. I usually do this and ad an s to the filename (for Small)
For example if the image "tornado.jpg" is 600X400,
I make a copy of teh image, resize it to 300X200 and name it "tornados.jpg"

Nice pictures btw!

 

[Max Slover]

Only problem I have with the site is that it has IE specific tags and won't view well in Firefox/Netscape/Mozilla based browsers. I didn't notice it until folks were commenting about the background sound of thunder which doesn't appear when you open it in firefox. When opened in IE, I heard the thunder (and probably saw the lightning ) and also noticed the buttons on the left hand side. Might consider something on the bottom of the page that says "optimized for IE" or some such statement.

Max...

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Yeah the image size made me give up on it. If I look at chaser pages I ain't waiting around on images to load. Those could be literally 1/10 to 1/20 that file size and still look exactly the same. What I got to see before giving up looked good though. I think most my pics are twice that size(dimensions) and about 1/15 the file size...and I think they look well enough. I don't have a problem with audio as usually(least with mine) if you hit the stop button in the browser the audio will stop. My window stopped loading before I got to hear the audio on your page.

Happy chasing!

 

[Mike Mezeul II]

Thanks for the input guys! I have decided to take off the sound, started to get irritating to me too, plus I decided to check the page at work, and BOOM, yeah the boss didnt like that. But anyways, a lot of you have been mentioning reducing the picture size, how can I do that? I'd appreciate any help!

 

[Mike Hollingshead]

Well you have the resolution set right, that is good. You don't need them over 72 dpi when online. Printing places often like 300 dpi or so. Whatever photo program you have should have a save as option. Save as as a jpeg and it should bring up something that lets you compress it as much as you want. If you go too far you'll lose quality, but you can go a long way. My pictures are often 400x320 at 72dpi and really never over 40k. If I didn't compress them at all at that size they'd probably be over 400k. So you can mess around saving as a jpeg and just look and see how far you can get it compressed that still looks good for you. I'd probably re-open it after saving it as I'm not sure they will all show you a new version after compressing. It is really that simple.

Good luck,

 

[Joe Nield]

I love the old farmhouse pics. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with a strange obsession for old abandoned places. :lol: