Topic: Comments on my page please.

I am making a make page for my friends company. What do you think about it.
http://www.kanonservice.se/tomipage/

Some links are not done yet. But you'll notice that

Any improvements or complimants?

/Thanks in advance
Smash

I like your flash banner, but I think it might be better to just play it once rather than looping it continuously.

You need to fix a few things with the markup if you want it to validate, but I don't think anyone cares about that.

I would have to know the language to make any more comments.

Josh

Thanks for your comments jdauie. They mean a lot to me.

/Smash

not bad. I like the flash. Where did you learn that?

I don't like the bars of grey underneath the navigation links. It doesn't seem to work with the contrast to white. I'd try making the white section the same colour, or at least tone it down a little, which would also make it easier reading. Just an idea.

First off, Elf needs encoding, badly (bad Gauntlet pun, sorry). Seriously, though, none of your pages have encoding, which causes serious problems for people like me (read the link above to find out why). IE is sometimes able to auto-detect the right encoding, but it seems to be pretty much hit and miss--some pages will detect, and then the next time I click them they won't detect, etc. And if IE doesn't guess right, some of those pages break severely.

Encoding, it's the right thing to do.

Secondly, I don't like the Flash. Once may be OK, but after a while it starts to get really annoying. My honest opinion? I don't think you need it in the first place. It doesn't add anything to the page, and you certainly won't be losing anything by taking it out.

I'm not terribly excited about the color scheme, but it doesn't cause me pain either, so I guess that's cool.

[This message has been brought to you in part by the Society for the Promotion of Encoding Awareness.]




www.liminality.org

Thx for the comments!

Jive: I am a newbie to flash, its nothing special, just some masking and a gradient, and a little sphere Thx for liking it though

Suho: Hmms, ok, thx for your critics, even though you practically only said it was crap I'll maybe add some encoding to the page

quote:

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even though you practically only said it was crap

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Uh...no. That's not what he said at all.
He pointed out some issue that the site had.... =)

As far as the Flash goes, I heartily agree. Flash simply for the sake of saying "look, i did this with flash" doesn't make sense to me. That could be a static image and be just as effective with a smaller file size and less of a chance that it will cause problems (for instance, when I looked at the page earlier, from work, I apparently don't have the proper version of flash, and so there was nothing but a big empty space at the top).

I would strongly recommend dropping the Flash and just making it a static image.

The color scheme, as Suho said, is certainly not exciting, but it works. I think the actual content needs some *serious* vamping up theough, visually. Right now, the header and links are getting *all* the attention, and the content is just nonchalantly dumped in the center.

Not good.

Remember that there is a big difference between a personal or design oriented site, and a business site. You need to have that content be the complete and total focus of that site, or your defeating the purpose of having a website for the business at all.

Larger text, more tonal variation, more bold headings, etc.

Cut down the size of that header image, cut down the size of the nav links, and vamp up the content.

Now, that aside, it seems to be a well put together site. It's just hard to tell with so much focus on the things that are the least important.



[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 07-01-2003).]

Thanks for the comments!

I will try to add focus to the content. The flash is by request so I cant remove it though...

Thanks
Smash

Smash: Believe me, friend, if I wanted to say that your web page was crap you'd know it.

It's not crap, though. It has potential, it just also has some (to borrow DL's term) issues.

As for the Flash being by request, well, that certainly does make a handy excuse, but I don't think it holds water. The job of a web designer (from what I understand, not being a professional web designer myself) is not to cater to every ridiculous whim the client may have, but to build the client a quality site. Just because the client says they want a silly, pointless Flash gimmick doesn't mean you have to bend over and pull down your pants (sorry for the graphic image, but that's how I feel about Flash for Flash's sake). Instead, you could present a convincing case for not using Flash. If you do a good job and the client has any common sense, the request may be retracted. It is, of course, possible to get a client with no common sense whatsoever. Personally, I wouldn't work for such a client. Yes, I know I'm not a web designer, but I am a translator, and I have clients too. And I don't let them push me around with ridiculous requests. So, really, it is up to you.

[Edit: Aaarrgh... grammar.]

OK, rant done.

[This message has been edited by Suho1004 (edited 07-03-2003).]

Just one more note on the Flash aspect - please, for their sake, point out to the client that there will certainly be people who won't see the Flash. As I said, here at work, there is nothing but a big empty space. Were I a potential customer, I would certainly be thinking "geez, do I really want to go with thiis company who can't even get their website right?"

Now, if the site was oreinted towards such things where Flash would have some relvence, it would be fine and dandy. But for the sake of having a little flashing highlight, it really borders on the absurd. It seems that an awful lot of people automatically think "I want Flash" when they think of having a website for their business, without really understanding why that's not necessarily a good thing...

I'd have to agree with the part about removing the flash. If it doesn't add anything important to the page, then it's not necessary. I can't read site, but I think it looks pretty nice, actually ;-)

One thing I might add.

I hadn't noticed this before but it looks like you're not using a JavaScript image preloader for the rollover buttons.
The rollovers appear after a slight lag, which is precisely why I didn't notice in the first place.

If you include a preloader, all the images are cached when the page is loaded, so the rollovers appear more quick and responsive.

The code for such a script can be found here: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/javascript_code_library/wm_pl_img/?tw=reference&category=user_interface


Hope it's useful.

I usually don't agree with flash, but this was unintrusive and so didn't really see the problem. Why not just use JS or something server-side to detect flash, give the user the flash if they'll be able to see it, and serve an image if they won't be able to. Semantically this is just the same, it's still a non-machine-interpretable hunk of byteage, not really doing any harm.

Or better yet, save the file as Flash Version 4, which every version 4+ browser has (save a few people on *nix OS's). It's only animation tweening after all so you shouldn't need any flash 5 or flash MX scripting capabilties.

And I believe that the <embed> or <object> tags cater for alternative content if it can't show the "object" or "embed" so if you simply dropped an image tag inside there then all should be fine. Although you may want to look up exactly how that's done as I can't remember the exact method offhand.

Thanks everybody for the comments. I will read them carefully and try to find a good answer to solve all the issues on. Thx for the replies