PlanetCatfish.com

Please, would it be possible to remove, or put an option in to turn off, the page transitions? They slow down navigation and are quite annoying...

Personally I quite like them but they are there precisely to slow down navigation (i.e. reduce bandwidth usage) from people with faster connections clicking all over the place and not actually absorbing any information presented on the pages.

Jools

Jools wrote:Personally I quite like them but they are there precisely to slow down navigation (i.e. reduce bandwidth usage) from people with faster connections clicking all over the place and not actually absorbing any information presented on the pages.

I don't understand - what's the point? They're there to limit bandwidth usage by slowing people down, or to, um, "encourage" surfers to read more before clicking?

To be honest I don't see how either goal is either desirable or achieved by slow page transition effects, as the effect is that more time is spent between pages...

Mike,

The point is cost.

This is oversimplified, but the principle is decreasing bandwidth consumption is desirable because the more bandwidth we use the more it costs to host the site. The introduction of the page transitions and latterly thumbnail pages greatly reduced bandwidth use upon introduction. It appears that the transitions modify the behaviour of the surfer, rather than clicking through all the larger images, they are more selective in chosing which ones they actually want to view.

I agree with you that slowing people down is not desirable, but what we have here is a trade off. An awful lot of visitors come to the site and just click around the images, we have more hits on the zebra pleco pictures per month than several large catfish families added together.

You can also use navigator to surf the pages, netscape have yet to implement transitions in their browser. Just as an aside, how long does a page transiation take on your computer? It should take less then 2 seconds, under 1 on a newer machine.

Thanks for asking the question, it's a valid point and one that I had forgotten about (which is easy to do) next time my bandwidth quotas are reviewed (up) I will test the waters again.

Jools

Mike_Noren wrote:Please, would it be possible to remove, or put an option in to turn off, the page transitions? They slow down navigation and are quite annoying...

Does anyone else have feelings about this for or against the page transitions? These are present in the cat-elog for internet explorer (v5 and above) users and cause the image and thumbnail pages to "wipe in" and "wipe out" from left to right.

Jools

Jools wrote:Mike,

The point is cost.

This is oversimplified, but the principle is decreasing bandwidth consumption is desirable because the more bandwidth we use the more it costs to host the site. The introduction of the page transitions and latterly thumbnail pages greatly reduced bandwidth use upon introduction. It appears that the transitions modify the behaviour of the surfer, rather than clicking through all the larger images, they are more selective in chosing which ones they actually want to view.

Aha. I admit I hadn't thought about that you might be paying per amount of transferred data.
I definitely don't want you to remove the transitions if it incurs higher costs for you... It's just a small annoyance, not anything really important, and if it saves money I say let it stay.

Just as an aside, how long does a page transiation take on your computer? It should take less then 2 seconds, under 1 on a newer machine.

About a second, I'd say. However, it's noticeable for me as I've got 10MBit connection, and normally there is zero delay in loading pages.

As I say, I'll certainly look at removing transiitions should (and that's probably a when) our bandwidth quotas go up (I think they're around 20gig a month at the moment).

I suspected you had a fast internet connection and I think you have just proved my point about slowing folks down! I know it's an irritation from your point of view, but i'd like to think of PlanetCatfish as a fairly slow, laid back place - it's not for dashing around in! (or at least not until bandwidth ceases to be an issue).

Thanks for bringing this up,

Jools

BTW, if you look into MSIE's tools > internet options dialog and click the advanced tab then there is an option to disable page transitions.

Jools