website design critique please

[Barnaby W. Füi]

You'd benefit from this thread. I also wrote a little blurb on there this morning.

I agree with alot of things said there. Flash is good for cartoons, games, etc. Live interactive things that you can't do with images/text/html. It has it's place, and is good at what it does, but it is overused.

 

[rh71]

Originally posted by: yoda291
r u sure you need flash? Does it add anything to your site beyond the first 2 seconds of "coolness" it lends that degrades into annoyance. If you ever see someone take bids on a design contract, and you recommend flash, you get bombarded with questions from all over the place. Why? Because if you use flash, there HAS to be a reason behind it. It increases loadtimes, incurs a processor penalty, and any DESIGNER (not engineer) who recommends it becomes circumspect. You need to have things like user profiling, test results on flash vs non-flash, percentages of viewers with plugin, ideal hardware, loadtime analyses...the whole 9 yards. Professionally done flash is very effective when properly integrated into a design, but costs many times more than the equivalent html too.

Did it for a friend. He wanted a flash intro. I have little time to spare (especially for free)... hence that's what came out of it. The subsequent pages do not need flash at all... except I figured it's easier and quicker to just throw it in seemingly seemlessly.

But actually... doing a menu in Flash makes for very easy development with good, but subtle, animation. I haven't chosen to use it that way (unless I decide it's worth the time), but many sites do. I agree with the potential performance hit, but the secondary flash menu is only 12k... smaller than most jpg/gifs total, that load on a given HTML webpage.

 

[RettaGuy]

800x600 it doesnt look bad...IMO
1024x768 it is passable to where I wouldnt complain...

maybe I am looking at the wrong page...I dont think it is as bad as everyone says it is

 

[rh71]

*nvm*

 

[911paramedic]

It took 10+ seconds after the page showed up, before the animation got the menu up. Very annoying, I would have clicked out long before that if you did not ask me to look at it. Have the menu load immediately, or enable a skip button.

 

[rh71]

how do ya like me now ?

 

[Mucman]

Originally posted by: BingBongWongFooey
Splash screens are bad design. They may look pretty, but people use the internet to get information and communicate, and splash screens only annoy. I can't see any of the site because I don't use flash.

ditto

 

[MrYogi]

coooool