Would you guys mind giving me some constructive criticism on my site purplerosephotography.com that i am working on for a friend.
i agree 4 mb is very large, however there is lots of images, it is for a photographer and most of the competitors are doing similar in flash around here.
Very very nice, but 23 seconds to get to the actual index?and then skip is needed to get to the information? Yeah right.
Thank you all for your feedback! I gather what every one is saying is that everything looks alright just eliminate the loading time. Any other feedback is very much appreciated.
its very "flashy" - takes a long time to actually get to where you want, because you have to wait for the site to load, then you get an intro, (and i couldnt see the 'skip'....but eventually did). The Purple doesnt really stand out on the black i'm afarid. very hard to read anything that is purple.... good photos......i can see the purpose of the site, there is just too much flashy stuff going on...... get rid of the music too.........
1st its BLACK 2nd its still black 3rd starting to load some video or flash or so but still black by now i kill my window as a general rule I NEVER waste time on black pages !! 4. after all it would be much too slow to wait until i actually see what KIND of content you have and if or not i would be on the right site to find that i look for ....
Holy crapola! 100% how not to make a website (sorry, but it's true). Flash, everybody's doing it: Then take a look at how the big guys use their Flash (not that their sites load any faster, don't have stupid intros we must skip and aren't accessible either) Font: DAMN SMALL CAN'T READ Purple: Ditto Here's what you do: the first page should be a normal page as far as being comprised of REAL TEXT (can a googlie-bot read it and get everything? That's a good thing, even if you don't care about googliebots). You could style this page similar to the page that shows up after the intro (and I'm sorry, but the intro isn't well done as far as using Flash to its full potential-- it looks like a PowerPoint Presentation-- more on this below) You can have a flash banner as a piece of the page, running as it loads. There is a way to make Flash movies load-while-running. The name of the site needs to be large and readable. If you want to keep black, then make this header white and LARGE. I tried to click Links and my popup blocker stopped it. Why is this menu item opening a popup? It should go to another page instead. Purple: if you're going to keep purple, you'll need to have light grey or white as the background (or at least an outline). There's no other way around it. Dark purple on black looks lovely on velvet, crappy on a website. You could get away having a purple-on-black design repeating softly in the background, but it cannot be text. Also, to have real text, you won't be able to keep lovely fonts, except Zapfino or whatever it's called for people using Macs, so for headers and things you'd use image replacement techniques to keep having real text instead of locking it up in images. Also, instead of clicking on names, I'd rather have the first couple's photo's show, or a vertcal list of couple's names and a single photo of each, so people can choose to click based on how they like the first photo or something. Flash: instead of moving the images around, I would do it more like this: Image starts on the left (assuming this has been changed to a banner with limited width and height sitting on a normal web page, but you could do this with an intro as well) and appears at the same time as the text. If the text MUST appear slower, then make the effect where a light is beginning to shine on the text as a whole, and happens quite quickly. Even on commercials, you only see single-letter-loading with small words like the name of a new car model-- the rest of the text doesn't do that because most people read faster than the loading and it's just annoying. Text and image fade out together, next image-and-text pair fade in together, but image now is on the right. Alternate. I strongly advise against making the pictures move around-- either you have a low framerate or you didn't tween correctly, or something, I have ADSL and the images still jittered as they moved-- you can get the same effect with just an animated gif, then. Mostly, I'd introduce either a medium to light grey, or white, as another colour in the pallette, because you need more contrast. Personally I wouldn't even have the intro but I understand why you tried it. You see it on sites like Nike. 90% of us skip them. Lastly, full Flash sites really really really limit your audience. If this girl's selling her services, then she's losing potential customers. Turn Flash off. This is what people without Flash get ( a Powered By message, nothing about the site or the photographer or anything). Flash should dress up a properly working page, in my opinion, and not run a site (now I've seen sites that have pulled this off, like http://www.oilily.nl/ but those people paid thousands of euros for Flash like that, and is still empty when there's no Flash).
Wow 'Stomme poes' very constructive feedback, thank you! I agree with the colour scheme and maybe eliminating the intro. I agree with not using flash in an SEO sense, however from a consumer perspective and not a webmaster perspective; is flash not better to use in order to portray the creativeness of the photographer? By "every one is doing it" i meant that other photographers are. If people are looking for photographers and all of the top photographers are using flash then i don't think that my site is going to loose consumers because of flash? Again thank you all for the feedback, please keep it coming. It looks like i get to redo it, so i may as well do it the best that i can.
I think it looks good, but it's too black. She's a wedding photographer not funeral photographer, right? If I were working on this, I'd definitely make the background white. I agree with most of what everybody's said so far, but I'd just add two things. 1) If you (or your client) don't want to drop the music, maybe at least provide a button to turn it off if a visitor doesn't want to hear it. 2) Cut down on the different types of transitions between photos. Using all those different transitions looks kind of amateurish. Call me boring but I think a fade/crossfade is all you need. The pictures are the centerpiece anyway and should be strong enough to make up for any lack of variety in the presentation.
I'll admit I don't look at many photographer's websites (stockxchange is it : ) but Flash really is icing on a cake. You take something that works and looks good FIRST and add some Flash on top of it. Flash can for instance take the place of a header div where you are free to use fades and nice fonts (sitting OVER an already readable pagetitle) to dress it up. You will not lose customers from not using Flash. You're worried about the professionalism of the site-- you can get that without or with minimal Flash. There are a number of people surfing out there with either Flash disabled or without it at all. Like I said, use Flash to add a nice touch. Don't think a site can't be professional without flash-- that's limiting yourself! Flash, if done by a real professional, can be very powerful in portraying an idea or feeling. However, that's extremely difficult to do. Just like everyone who's decent with a Super 8 isn't Robert deNiro, the number of people who can really get Flash showing its true potential is small. And they are all damn rich, the way they are paid! (there is a guy I know of who animates in Flash, doesn't get paid as far as I know, takes him a year to make a small animated film (greenbriar? blackbriar? with the hair-headed goat-guy in the woods?) and they are pure genius films, but that's rare). So you use the tool in the most suitable way. And Flash is but a tool-- a painter doesn't just use one kind of brush, and a fashion designer doesn't use one type of fabric. You can do amazing things with more flexible tools like CSS, or even JS (as much as I hate it, I've seen some really nice effects with it). When you're building web sites you need to think both like a customer AND a webmaster, and by customer you need to think about all sorts-- okay, she'll prolly never get a blind person visiting her gallery (lawlz, unless they're looking up info about her, which the site it lacking-- no prices or booking dates or whatever?), but people surf with images off (they'd turn them on when they get to an actual gallery page), have low bandwidths, old screens (not as bright as newer screens, esp older LCDs get dim as they age), old people, people with bad eyes (so they need to be able to enlarge the text to read it better), people at work behind corporate firewalls (can block scripts if you use them (usually okay with flash)), people who are colourblind, people on 600x800 monitors.... etc etc etc. Which is why you start with a semantic, basic, working site. Think of it as sitting on the bottom holding everything up. Then you see how far you can get with CSS, fonts, image replacement. THEN comes scripts or Flash. Hmmm, I wonder if I can find a nice example somewhere... a photographer's site done right... not sure if I will run across one. You'll notice on the oililly site I linked to earlier has something in their menu (I didn't click it) saying something about a video presentation. If you remove the jaggies of the intro and feel it should still be on the site because of the amount of work it was or whatever, then you can always have it as a menu option for those who want to see it. Another idea is a Splash page (just as annoying as a Flash intro, you still need to click to get to the site), where usually an image (or a collection of images like a collage) introduces the site... maybe a bunch of faintly tinted or sepia'd photographs in the background (photos with lots of white in them), and bright purple Zapfino-style text saying "Angela's photography gallery" or whatever. Clicking on either that text or the little link (you'll have BOTH) sends visitors to the main page. *edit I agree with Kirkbride, you can have music but always provide a stop button for visitor's convenience. People appreciate it. *edit 2-- another thing that's annoying is that when you're looking at the images of a couple, you can click to the one you want to see, but within a few seconds it moves on to the next one whether you're done looking at it or not! Better to have the auto-scroll thing stop so long as someone's paging through the images, and only have it on in the beginning (if at all). Have you seen the trick where there's a bunch of thumbnails sitting (or arranged artfully) on a page, and people can either hover over the thumb to see the larger image, or click on the thumb and see a really really large image? Or, with JS, a lightbox? Those are two options that are more accessible right there, and lets people explore the images themselves, at their own pace.
Yeah the images Definately need to be sized down (In kb's) Because 4 Mb takes long to load. People want it to load fast, otherwise they will shut it off. and just go to another site.
Try divide the site into smaller sections (movieClips) and have them load on request. Also, try making the first frame/scene (where the loader is located) much smaller in file size so that the loader will appear almost instantly. Hope that helps, good luck.
10 seconds is on average the amount of time someone is willing to wait for a page to load, i only waited to count how long.. about 20 secs.. waaaaay too long... if pos import the images into flash as .gifs or make some pics black and white, or just shorten the vid... nicely designed loading bar though - also add a mute button!