thoughts, comments, critic please

[Enginedown]

www.caminotcha.net (http://www.caminotcha.net)

[Benjamin]

The flash site has a good style to it. I'm not so keen on the wood effect.
Why not launch directly into the flash site - the splash page doesn't seem to serve any purpose since there is no html version?

http://www.jackfruitdesign.com/
Om Namah Shivaya

[Dakota1]

I agree with Benjamin on the splash page, also the black text is hard to read on that colour background. A little tweaking and it could be a cool site.

[Enginedown]

yah well i put the splash page there in case some one doesnt have the flash plug in. The background is different every time so you cant reall make the text work on all for them.

[Aidrice]

This site is a classic case of 'f**k y*u' Flash... shall I count the ways?

1. Splash page. Waste of time/bandwidth -- as Benjamin says, especially because you aren't offering an alternative.
2. Site opens in a new window. Huh????
3. New window (see #2) has no chrome, so user has no control: no scrollbars, no progress bar, no resize, nothing.

To me this kind of Flash site says one thing: that the designer doesn't give a s**t about the user. I see these sites every day, and all they do is give Flash a very, very bad name. Your content is meaningless given the presentation. Nothing personal about you -- just a bad approach to web design, IMHO.

[Enginedown]

hah wow. well this my first website for an actually cleint. Thanks for the advice. The reason i did the popup flash is beacuse the background image changes and if it was in a normal window there would be white space around it. another reason for the popup is beacause i dont want them to beable to resize or scroll, beacause its a flash site it could be distorted. what could i do to make it better?

[Michael Drozdovsky]

For the first website, it's quite good I think.

[Benjamin]

If you make the background into a repeating pattern you can tile it and it won't matter how big the window gets.
Also, you could make the flash box on the page into a fixed size in pixels, then it won't be affected by resizing.
Look at a few other flash sites to see how they have done it.

http://www.jackfruitdesign.com/
Om Namah Shivaya

[Aidrice]

Hi Enginedown,

Sorry for the vitriol I spewed the other day... I shouldn't have been so harsh. It's just that I see so many sites that seem to be built to showcase the skills of the designer rather than to provide information and/or service to the viewer. I think it's really, really important to think of the people who are going to visit the site, and what the experience will be for them. Taking away the user's control of the browser window creates a situation more like TV or print advertisement: the user is passive & helpless. The beauty & brilliance of the Internet is the interactivity that the user has with the medium and the information within.

It's way too easy to jump on the Flash bandwagon without realizing that Flash has some real limitations. All-Flash sites are by nature inaccessible -- and HTML (and by extension the Internet) is all about accessiblity. It's possible to use Flash files within an HTML site, so one can have the best of both worlds-- accessiblilty AND the visual richness that Flash can provide.

I noticed an error that shows up for me -- on the homepage, the last sentence is cut off: 'we'd like to thank Chris Harris for building our new' and then the rest is not visible. I'm not crazy about the blue background, it's kind of ovewhelming and it takes a long time to load. Maybe a simpler bg...

The site is good, it shows what you want to show--I'd work on the way it's structured.

Post Edited (Aidrice) : 11/2/2004 3:41:31 AM GMT