New site for Aussie market - Feedback please

[kiwi]

OK, interesting, thanks Mate

[derekclapham]

Hi guys,

First of all I'd like to declare that I'm the CTO & Co-Founder of PhotoMerchant. I've been reading through some of the threads on the AusPhotography forum and came across this one which I've found to be very interesting.

The feedback you've all given on Allann's site is of particular interest to me as I'm responsible for improving PhotoMerchant as a product from a technical perspective.

I'd like to comment on a few of the points that have been raised in this discussion.

This evening we are taking the PhotoMerchant platform down for a few hours to perform a huge infrastructure upgrade. We've experienced quite large growth over the past 6 months and as a result need to improve the infrastructure so that's it's more scaleable. We're doing this in a number of ways.

Firstly we're moving the entire system to a clustered environment which will grow and shrink on demand.
Secondly, we're deploying all the photos to a CDN (Content Distribution Network) which will increase the speed at which images are loaded. The end result of this upgrade should be increased speed in the loading of customers PhotoMerchant websites.

We are acutely aware that many of our customers would like to see an image sharing feature. This is currently in the works and it will allow the photographer to share their images on other sites. We're taking our time with this because we want to ensure the security of our customers photos (their I.P.) and as is our custom we want to design it in such a way that our users have complete control over how their images are shared.

In the near future we're also going to be making changes to how images are loaded and cached on PhotoMerchant powered websites. These changes will improve the first time load speed and thus improve the user experience.

As has already been said in this thread, the images that are found in the image_cache/ folder are not guaranteed to work forever because as the name suggests, it is a "cache" and from time to time we clear this cache. For instance, after tonights upgrade, there's a strong possibility that the images from Allann's site that are posted above will cease working.

Also, I'd like to say that we're extremely open to feedback from our users or "potential" users. We run a fully transparent forum which is designed to allow people to post questions, ideas, problems and praise here: http://getsatisfaction.com/photomerchant

Hope this answers any questions in peoples minds. Allann, love your work

[Allann]

Thanks Derek, and welcome to AP. We are a large site and I'm sure you will get quite a few people coming to you in the near future as the service continues to improve and cater for the Australian photographer.

Great to see your a site sponsor too

[derekclapham]

Thanks for the welcome Allan,

I used to spend a lot of time on forums such as these. Back when I used to pick up my camera much more than I do today (unfortunately).

Hopefully I'll find some time to contribute to the discussions over the coming weeks and months.

Regards