Kilt sample Photos

[jordanjm]

I have heard that here in the US, unless specifically copyrighted that arms have NO protection. US lacks anything like Lord Lyon's Court, or other body in another country.

[Kilted-Marine]

DONE

All heading on the site have had the Royal Arms removed

Samples haev been made a little smaller - Still if you are on dial up or a slow connection it will take some time to load

Any More changes we need to make?

[Kilted-Marine]

As a general note-Ya really can not get away with too much with this crowd...lol..I do not mind the constructive criticism and in fact it helps us make our site better - we will always be open to comments and suggestions. we did the samples page because many people asked for it

I do find it interested that the only place we posted the .com/samples.htm site was on xmark and within 48 hours we had a letter from the Scottish Tartans Authority telling us they had had a SERIOUS COMPLAINT about us... We are working on that.

When we first opened we had borrowed some ladies pictures from a website...please note this ladies pictures are on about 1000 other sites...but WE received an email from them...lol..we removed the pictures within 24 hours..problem solved.

We had the Royal Coat of Arms-it is now gone-Although I would have liked to get a letter from the Queen for my scrap boook..or at least an email...

We will always strive to make sure we are complying with any and all U.S. laws or laws that are recognized or enforceable within the USA.

[sjrapid]

Mark

The tartan sample pics loaded just fine here - less than 30 seconds to load all the samples from nothing - this over about 4.6kbps DSL in London, UK.

Best regards

[Abax]

Mark,

First off, let me say thank you for supporting XMarks. I appreciate the good work this site does, and your support is appreciated.

I don't usually respond to personal attacks like the ones you posted above, but I don't think you meant to be offensive . . . maybe you were just being defensive. You seem to be sincere about promoting kilts, so there's something good right there. I offer the information below as constructive criticism. Not belittling or demeaning but intended as assistance. Read what I've written below and you'll see I don't insult you even once.

First we have no codes protecting the pictures...second if you ever want to get an image off the web you can always screen print it and paste it to paint.

I stand corrected. It appears to be a fluke of the HTML which I presume you created in Microsoft Word.

The fact is they are large images.....large images take longer to load

Quite so. I count 37 megabytes of PNG images alone on http://www.thefrugalcorner.com/samples.htm. That's far in excess of what's needed for a typical display on a computer monitor.

could it be your Internet connection-is your high speed really high speed, what is your MTU set at, were you also doing other things on your computer, is it a cable connection on a shared segment? Of course theh connection I have at home is a 10 Meg Cat 5E running down to a load balancing router with 4 Data T1's.....but what do i know about these computer and network thingies

My Internet connection works just fine. Boasting about your unusual connection isn't likely to make your customer downloads any faster.

Abax..come on-you said "IF THEY CANT GET THEIR WEBSITE TOGETHER THERE MAY BE OTHER PROBLEMS"

Like what, ---What other problems directly relates to a slow website...drunken driving, fraud, civil unrest, rebellion, WHAT

Offhand, I'd say one symptom would be someone inviting everyone on XMarks to take a look at their new web page, then being demonstrably defensive about some constructive criticism . But seriously, when I consider doing business with a vendor for the first time, I evaluate the presence they project, whether it be a brick-and-mortar store or an Internet web site. Sure, other things will be considered too. But I believe the care and expertise that are evident in a web site may say something about the care and expertise that go into other elements of the business.

a faster page may make you happy but it also means having smaller pictures, maybe with lower resolution..there is no way around this issues..LARGER files require longer downloads..more 0's and 1's flowing over the copper wiring that runs from our server to you

I'm using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. The comments that follow are based on viewing your web page using that browser. Right now, IE6 and IE7 account for about 57% of all browsers out there, so my browser isn't all that unusual, and it certainly accounts for a very large segment of your viewing audience (Firefox is third with about 34% of the market).

You have taken enormous files and then (I presume unknowingly) asked your customer's browser to scale them down, negating any benefit the huge files might have held in the first place. For example the "MacLeod Hunting" image (image021.png) you show on this page - http://www.thefrugalcorner.com/samples.htm - started life as a 1280 x 1024 pixel 24 bit PNG image that consumes 3 MB (PNG include lossless compression, otherwise it would be about 3.75 MB). It took my Internet connection and your server 26 seconds to get just this image on my screen.

Your Word-generated HTML squeezes the original MacLeod Hunting image (image021.png) in to an HTML table cell that resizes it to fit in a custom textbox object that is 225.75 points x 205.5 points. First off, if the image had been scaled proportionately, it would have retained the 1.25 ratio of width to height, so your textbox object (with a ratio of width to height of 1.09) compressed and distorted the width of the image - certainly not something you'd want to do when showing a tartan. Second, if you had resized the image to display at the same width as your HTML forces the image to, it would only consume about 147Kb, about 5% the size of the large file.

Not only is there no point to squeezing a really large image in to a really small table, but asking the browser to resize images often results in less than optimal renderings. Here is a screen shot of another image from http://www.thefrugalcorner.com/samples.htm showing the MacKenzie Modern tartan as squeezed down into your HTML table:



Here is a screen shot of the source image (image023.png) displayed at 100% size:


Look at the first red intersection below the hanger in each photo . . . they are quite different colors (magenta vs red), aren't they? You are much better off resizing images in a graphics program rather than letting a user's unknown browser do it for you. Resizing an image in even a high-end graphics program does induce color shifts, but this effect can be minimized, a much better situation than the uncontrolled environment of a browser.

So here are my recommendations:

1) Stop using Microsoft Word as an HTML editor. It produces some of the worst HTML in existence - it's bloated, unnecessarily complex, difficult to control and difficult to maintain.

2) Resize your images in a graphics editor, adjusting the resulting color as necessary. How big should the image be? If you're happy with the current sizes rendered in a typical browser, then about 300 pixels wide.

3) Consider obtaining information about designing web pages for usability. This is a tough subject for which either a lot of study and practice or professionals are usually required.

These recommendations aren't revolutionary - you'll find much the same information in a lot of other places. Rather than debate with me, here are some references you can consult:

Jakob Nielsen has written several good books on usability:
http://www.useit.com/

There are lots of sites that describe the issues regarding images and their display on monitors. Here's one I found at random searching on "dpi print monitor":
http://www.sphoto.com/homedd/

I sincerely wish you the best of luck with your endeavors.

Abax

[M. A. C. Newsome]

When we first opened we had borrowed some ladies pictures from a website...please note this ladies pictures are on about 1000 other sites...but WE received an email from them...lol..we removed the pictures within 24 hours..problem solved.

We had the Royal Coat of Arms-it is now gone-Although I would have liked to get a letter from the Queen for my scrap boook..or at least an email...

We will always strive to make sure we are complying with any and all U.S. laws or laws that are recognized or enforceable within the USA.

Mark,

One last peice of free advice and then I'll leave you alone. When you take a picture from someone else's web site and then use it on your own, that's not "borrowing." That's stealing. Just because that same picture may appear on lots of other sites does not make it public domain. I think you know that. (I wonder how many of those "other sites" you mention were actually retailing products from the company in question and using their product images legitimately?)

Regardless of whether or not those pictures were public domain or copyrighted material, the fact that you were initially willing to use photographs of another company's products to advertise your own simply isn't good. I didn't say anything when that subject was originally brought up in a different thread here on X Marks because others made the same points I would have made and you were quick to remove those images. However, you bring it up now again as an example of how you are striving to operate your company according to laws that are "enforceable in the USA."

This sentiment illustrates a very minimalist and legalist attitude. "If I can't be punished for it, then it's not wrong to do." But the question shouldn't be "is this enforcable in the USA?" The question should be "is this the right thing to do?"

If a tartan, for instance, is a proprietry design that is protected by law in the UK, the fact that you are having your products made in Pakistan and are selling them in the USA may mean that those protections instituted in the UK are not enforceable (or at least not easily so). But that doesn't make it right.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

[sjrapid]

Interesting and perceptive comments, Abax.

I've just tried loading the pages again using IE 7.0.6 rather than my usual Firefox 2.0.0.5.

The browsing experience is very different indeed. I guess Firefox does some sort of progressive rendering trick on the images, as it loads the whole page in less than 30 seconds (from a cleared cache) as I posted previously.

IE7 on the other hand clearly doesn't do this trick. From a cleared cache, it took 18 minutes to download just 3 of the pictures before IE's timer expired and it gave up trying on the rest.

Best regards

[Rampant Lion]

I too think that your image files are too large. I have a very fast internet connect here at work and it too longer for the sample page to load than I would expect for images of that size. Anything over 1MB for an image file is huge. Perhaps another format would work better, like .jpg/.jpeg.

I was looking through my cache and I noticed that some of the sample picture files are less that 0.5MB. If you could get all of the images to that size I think you'd be golden.

[Casper]

I'd just like to jump in at this point and re-iterate that I don't beleive that its anyone's intent to bash/attack here (which, i've noticed, tends to happen a LOT, and far more than any other vendor on this site!).

Mark&Mark are great community members, and having this kind, and volume of, suggestions/comments only makes sure that they're not nailed to the wall further down the road by a more litigous individual/company!

Better here, now, by this lot than in a courtroom, where it would only get rather expensive!


- Chris

[majdan]

I think that Mark has responded well to the comments offered here. I believe that he realizes that Matt knows wherefore he speaks. He's taken the comments made here and made the needed changes to his site. One of the benifets of belonging to this board is that it is a ready made "Murder Board(this is a good thing)" overflowing with knowledge and wisdom. The problem with text is that all of the communication out side of the text is lost. This opens some responses up to misinterpitation and quarling as seen between Abax and Mark as well as between The Wiz of BC and Mark. Remember that one of the rules of the froum is to be civil. We are all fellow kilties here.

Now back to the topic:

1) The pictures are large and took me a while to load as well.

2) It might be helpful to use a smaller pic size to speed up load time as people like myself who are too cheap to buy quality internet service have short attention spans will tend to skip over sites that don't load quickly and go some place that does.

3) I just bought 2 kilts from FC so it must not have been that slow but I am rather concerned that the sample kilt in Pride of Scotland looks much lighter than the tartan sample. I know that this may just be the lighting and have no desire to change my order but I just thought it was darker.

4) I'm looking forward to my new kilts with baited breath.