I can’t say as I agree with your overall opinion, but certainly your experiences count when it comes to improving things. Perhaps you could contribute some specific ideas somewhere down the line.
As far as your site load time goes, I agree; It’s absolutely unpleasant. That in itself may speak to just your server quality, or maybe some caching issues.
I also see some potential difficulties, one specifically being: “/?doing_wp_cron” popping up in your urls.
Some discussions about that issue and some possible causes can be found here: http://wordpress.org/search/doing_wp_cron?forums=1
Seems you’ve gone through some effort to obscure your WP version as well, so don’t forget to remove the readme.html file that’s at root, if that’s the case.
It’s a great looking site. I’m sure it will fill out nicely.
Best wishes!
Yes, I would suspect some kind of server issue as to speed, and I have heard another reason for not having a background image is because of some kind of negative effect at phones and small screens. However, and having just zoomed to max-in and max-out in Firefox here on my old notebook, I was amazed at how well your site responded while seldom showing much of its background image anyway.
Thank you Clayton, I don’t understand the first line of your response. You can’t say… what?
Site has been upgraded and is now on 3.6, just took a while.
Specific ideas = look at the wiki interface and copy that! It is such a more pleasant visual and practical experience for every type of interaction.
All other internet searches/pages/loads run at lightening speed and I have had complaints from people who visit our site (obviously using differing servers to access) that’s how I know it is wordpress, not host server related.
I’m sorry I don’t understand what you are mean in your para 3 or para 5.
I love the look of the site, its just slow and user unfriendly to update. As a result, I’m looking at ways to use Wix now for my website.
Cheers.
UI: http://make.wordpress.org/ui/
It’s not just change the UI to make it look cooler. You have to think of user testing, compability, older browsers and so on. With that said, i agree that it’s pretty outdated. But, it’s being worked on.
You can not compare Wix (it’s a online service) with a selfhosted WordPress install. Two very different things.
When it come to your site, i must say there is no wonder it’s slow.
The first page it’s 3.4mb. It got plenty of scripts running (19), unoptimizied images (You can cut down the image file size to something like 80%).
Also. Your host IS slow. When i checked around and run a few tests, your host (Austdomains*) came up with very low scores. Actually, customers of that hosting company is complaing A LOT on slow access times.
*If i got the wrong host, sorry. But the problems are the same
So if i where you. Optimizie! Or if you want static pages. Use that webservice Wix, it maybe works out better for you. You could also try WordPress.com
Cheers.
I designed a fully functioning website with multiple pages, links and images in less than 1 hour on wix. My current site took over 12 hours to design by comparison and is so slow.
Again. You cannot compare a website builder service with WordPress. It’s like comparing eating out on fast food restaurant to cooking the food yourself.
@jimmycee
Thank you Clayton, I don’t understand the first line of your response. You can’t say… what?
Now that I re-read “I can’t say as I agree with your overall opinion”, it seems idiomatic. I probably should have simply said: “While I cannot agree with your opinion, your experiences certainly count when it comes to improving things.” The reason is that I too, think you might be comparing apples to oranges – but that doesn’t mean you don’t have some good ideas to share.
I’m sorry I don’t understand what you are mean in your para 3 or para 5.
Paragraph 3 – While browsing your site, I encountered several instances of “/?doing_wp_cron” being appended to your permalinks in the browser address bar. Here is an example I took directly from your site not 2 minutes ago:
http://sydneyvocalproject.com/?doing_wp_cron=1378341133.2004649639129638671875
I offered a link to some discussions where there was information about what might be causing that, and what you might look for if it continues.
Paragraph 5 – While viewing the source code of your site, I noticed that the WordPress version (meta name=”generator”) which is normally visible has been obfuscated or removed. WordPress doesn’t do that by itself, so the assumption might be that you could have taken some measures to minimize your version exposure for security purposes. I was just offering a reminder not forget to remove the readme.html file that’s in your root directory as part of that process.
Sorry for the confusion!
