Re: Please critique my new site...

by Emily Berk <emily(at)armadillosoft.com>

 Date:  Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:53:27 -0700
 To:  "Rajnish Bhaskar" <r.bhaskar(at)educ.gla.ac.uk>
 Cc:  hwg-critique(at)hwg.org
 References:  earthlink
  todo: View Thread, Original
Thanks to everyone who responded to my request.

(If I didn't want you to be honest, I'd have asked a bunch of cheerleaders!)

Don't know if I can do much about the "sparseness" as that was the artist's choice, but I will certainly work on the technical issues.

And, yes, I am doing a pretty cool Flash trick to detect whether Flash is present or not.  Nifty, huh?  Thanks for letting me know it's working.  Everyone I know has Flash already installed these days, even guys on very sparsely-populated PCs.  

(The artist really wanted a full-screen-motion home page.  We thought about animated GIFs, but I was concerned about making them that big.  And, my feeling is that the intro is so short that it's ok, even though I am usually very negative about Flash.)

Can't believe that horizontal scroll!  (It's on my system too, I was just working so hard to make the bottom menu come out right, that I hadn't noticed the scroll.)

If you click on the company names in the left side of the Print page, the artist's print samples are displayed.   Guess that was not obvious, huh?  And, actually, NONE of the navigation is obvious.  Can you tell that the designer is from the Mac world?  The idea is that the viewer just "explores the universe" of the website...

I'll let you know as the site progresses.

Thanks again for all input.  Please keep cards & letters coming in, but I won't see them for a while unless you send them directly to me.

-- Emily

At 09:35 AM 7/2/2004 +0100, Rajnish Bhaskar wrote:
>Hi Emily,
>
>> It's at: http://www.creativend.com/
>> 
>> Some of the links are bad, and not all the alt tags are there...
>
>Mozilla 1.8a2+, Win2K, 1600x1200.  IE6 as well
>
>* The colour scheme is nice with decent contrast and it does make 
>me think "artist" :).
>
>* The front page looks very empty.  It leaves me with a sense of 
>"what now?".  Some sort of indication of what the site was about 
>would be good.
>
>* Is there some server-side browser sniffing going on, since IE6 
>gets a Flash intro to the front page (srHome.html) and Mozilla 
>gets a static one (srHome.php), although to be honest, I prefer 
>the static one, since waiting for the Flash animation to load 
>every time you go back to the homepage is just annoying.
>
>* It took me a while to realise that the circle with "art" in it 
>was a link
>
>* On the Art pages, it took a while to figure out what the 
>numbers next to each word (tulips, pears etc) were since in your 
>stylesheet you have .xsmYellowBody {... ; cursor: auto; ...;}
>This has the effect of making the cursor a normal "I-bar" when 
>you hover over the numbers, making it difficult to realise that 
>they are links.
>If you remove "cursor: auto;" rule it should work fine in Mozilla 
>and Internet Explorer.
>
>* There is a horizontal scroll bar on the Art pages for no 
>apparent reason.  This shows up in both Mozilla and IE6
>
>* I'm not sure what the Print section is for, 
>
>* There is a lack of consistant way of getting back to the 
>homepage -- there's the artist's name, a "home" button and these 
>are in different places on different pages.  Maybe this could be 
>made consistant.
>
>Sorry if this has sounded negative, but it was all meant to be 
>constructive :o).
>
>HTH,
>Raj.
>-- 
>Rajnish Bhaskar, Technical officer
>IT Education Unit, University of Glasgow
>r.bhaskar(at)educ.gla.ac.uk, http://www.iteu.gla.ac.uk/
>--
>Be seeing you

Emily Berk
http://www.armadillosoft.com

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