Improved Texture Thumbnails and Full Size Previews

Our thumbnails and full size previews look better now.

Previously our texture thumbnail listings were cluttered because alpha channel thumbnails were displayed alongside the normal thumbnails. After changes made last night, only regular texture thumbnails are displayed and then when you click on a thumbnail you get a full size preview with the alpha channel displayed as well. This makes navigating our texture map products and samples much easier.

The changes are visible on the following pages:

• trees texture pack (this page was cumbersome when it showed alpha channels)
• flowers texture pack (these are some of my favorite textures, the flowers are absolutely beautiful)
• shrubs and grasses texture pack
•  foreground textures
  

Currently I am regenerating our large product preview images. That should be done in an hour or so.

Duh, fixing the little things

We are still tweaking our website, especially the little things. One thing that finally hit me today is that the average web surfer viewing one of our example images might think that was the full resolution of our actual products.

In reality, our textures are 3-4 times LARGER than the example images. Today I posted a note on all our example images. Actually, it was a simple edit of the attachment.php file that WordPress uses and that updated everything sitewide.

It is so easy to miss simple things like that when you are building a site. With all the major site building behind us I  am enjoying fixing the little things like and trying  to perfect the site. In 3-6 months I think we will have the site in very good shape and be able to focus on coming out with Volume II of most of our texture packages. There are also some fun new upcoming packages like “Fall Trees” that have some absolutely gorgeous colors.

Updated HTML titles for SEO

John H. sent me an email last night with some new code for the site. He also had the following advice:

One thing you may want to keep in mind is Google is changing their ranking methods, and keeping the site name somewhere in the title at all times may be a good idea.

I took John’s advice and did some updating. For example, the texture products title was updated to: Textures by NetRender.com – Photorealistic Image Maps the idea was to get NetRender in the title, as well as cover both the “textures” keyword and “image maps” keywords.

I also removed the word “volume” from our HTML titles because who is going to search for the word volume? Example: Tree Textures Volume 1 – Photos and Images of Pines, Willows, Oaks by NetRender.com becomes Tree Textures 1 – Photos and Images of Pines, Willows, Oaks by NetRender.com I realize the title is still a bit lengthy, but if anything gets truncated in search listings it will be the “NetRender.com” ending which shouldn’t matter much.

Tree Textures updated to: Tree Textures – NetRender.com

Replaced the word “image” with “photo” in many of our title because more people search for photo than image.

That is about it for the updates today, it’s time to have a nice restful Sunday.

PS I ordered a new 35-100mm F2.0 Olympus lens today for taking new image maps. This is supposed to be a super-sharp lens so I am rather excited to see the results!

Improved IE Display of Footer and Textures

John H. sent me some updated CSS this morning for NetRender. Thanks to John’s CSS, things are looking a lot better now when the site is viewed in Internet Explorer. The individual texture / product pages are showing the sample thumbnails correctly now . Likewise, the footer is also looking nice.

Thanks John!

New Texture Product Boxes, IE Tweaks

John O. is working on some new product boxes for NetRender. He’ll be revamping all of the boxes and even adding some new ones:

• revising the trees texture pack (John H. did this box)
• revising the flowers texture pack (another beautiful John H. creation)
• revising the shrubs and grasses pack (I created this one)
• adding a totally new box for foregrounds.

Tomorrow I believe John H. will be improving the CSS on NetRender. The main tweaks should be for improving the site when viewed in IE. I am a big FireFox fan myself but IMHO  it is always a good idea to have your site look good in as many browsers as possible

The NetRender blog, textures and more!

Hi, thanks for visiting!

This is the NetRender blog. The place where we post extra tidbits of information about textures and rendering that don’t quit fit on our main commercial site. But FYI, if you’re looking to buy one of our textures, our e-store is located at www.netrender.com

Why have two websites? Well, we wanted to have a place where we could write about texture mapping, architecture, renderfarms, rendering software, etc. We didn’t think it made sense to clutter up our store with lots of extra text and info, hence we have this dedicated blog.

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact us.