Firefield Web Designs
The design is slightly rushed, and right now we're working on exporting AVI's from 3DS Max into the flash for Version 2. We're going to have message boards and tutorials up soon.
I'm not much of an expert to critique, but I'll just give my lil piece on the site.
At first I didn't get the red bar at the bottom, really didn't fit the layout. Once the flash menu loaded though, then I got it, and it looks pretty nice (At work I have crap Dialup and an old computer)
I am using Netscape7.02 (not by choice) and everything seems to work good. The flash runs very horribly but this is an old p400 with only 96MB ram, and dialup, so that is expected.
The only page issue I see is at the bottom, where the red bar / copyright is..I assume that is supposed to fit to the bottom of the page but it doesnt..and the page scrolls below it which looks odd considering the small scroll box in the content.
Anyways nice job, I love the color scheme and I like the flash menu quite a bit..I like the doors closing with the little particles :P
Edit://
I was looking over the page a bit more and I noticed one other issue, at least for me. The fonts in the Flash stuff are very blurry and hard to read. Actually its legible here at 800x600 but it appears that anything higher might make it non-legible..
Just something I noticed. =D
One more edit, heh, sorry. At 1024x768 the fonts in the flash are still fairly legible..although blurry...but anything higher is extremely hard to read..worse as I go up..and I think most people use 1024x768 min nowadays..but that's just my opinion. Ah yeah and this is a 17" monitor. I'll recheck the site on my home computer in an hour or so. (Edited by Shifter on 05-06-2004 00:32)
You know, our flash design is quite big, and we're going to eventually get around to building a fully HTML site. But our priority right now is getting all the sections complete.
I agree about the red bar at the bottom seeming a little out of place, however, I think it will fit better once the tutorial's and messageboard's sections are up.
I'm actually a little upset as to how the design came out, in that Patrick (the co-designer) did most of the work. I did all of the planning and layout work, and the graphics themselves, but the flashwork is heavily programming-intensive. Especially the particle effects. So I'm really looking forward to the second build.
The reason the page scrolls below the red bar is that the sections for the Tutorials and the Message boards are going to be below the 2 existing sections, so it shouldn't be such a big space, if any at all, when they're implimented.
[EDIT]
Hrm, I don't have much of a problem reading them at 1280x1024 on a 21" Monitor. However, my eyes are very fixated and trained by now. But I see the issue, and I'll talk to Patrick about it.
[/EDIT]
Hrm, Can't edit last post due to time restrictions.
Well, our site will be down for another day at least, sorry. We are getting another domain, and for some reason Patrick decided to change the old one to redireect to the new one. And the new one hasn't propagated yet for some reason. And so he made changes today and it should be up soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. But check back tomorrow and it should be fine.
Man, oh man ... what makes designers continue to squeeze all of their important content into an itty bitty box? Honestly now, you've set aside more space for your news and tutorials then you have your business ... on your business website!
Although it appears nothing in your portfolio works, looking at your website I don't know if either of you possess the talent in Flash to offer a competitive product. I would suggest scraping your current Flash website and focusing more on static design. Your website is fine for a couple of guys creating a personal website but this is supposed to be a business website. You might want to re-evaluate who your clients are going to be. I hope you don't take those statements personal.
Also, if you're happy in using Flash to attract customers you might consider re-designing your website. As I've already said, you've squeezed all of your important content into a tiny box. You have a large window to play around with. First and foremost, get rid of the tutorials and site news. They're uncessary. Re-design your site so it takes advantage of the majority of the window screen. Also, you might want to skip on some of the trendy grunge effects in your current design. Obviously you want to attract customers and 17 year old RATM fans generally aren't hiring.
Of course you'll want to add something to your portfolio before going live with the site. Your customers are going to want to see what else you have done with your talents. Its not very likely that a potential client will contact you with the few grunge thumbnails that don't link in your portfolio section. If you haven't done a lot of work, create a few mock-business website, and start walking into small business and showing them what you can do and offer to create their websites for free for the experience. You'll probably get shot down the vast majority of the time but after a few days you might walk away with a few clients. Churches and political candidates are also always looking for volunteers. Just make sure you put together something that looks appropriate for business.
I guess I'll stop here. Feel free to ask any questions or for me to clearify my points.
Whats the point of putting up a site and asking for reviews if you're already in the process of creating a new one? Why didn't you just wait an extra week or so and go live with v.2?
From: Rochester, New York, USA Insane since: May 2000
posted 05-10-2004 03:16
I am really not sure how I feel about this, for some reason I feel like I am being a big crap head, but I think you might need some solid artistic direction, your designs are nice and clean, and it isn't fundamentally wrong, but it is lacking artistically.
ALsitApart just ran a good article about this, titled Art Direction and the Web. It talks more about creating the identity as opposed to just sketching a site.
A couple of really great web design sites which have some identity.
I am not saying any of these sites provide good service, but I feel like they have an identity, they say something, it all ties together to give me a positive feeling about what they provide.
And I dont mean to crap on your suggestion but half of those links are to companies who sell web templates. And I know you said it's not based on their business, but that just says something about their website to me. And that I shouldn't take what they do as a basis of something we should aspire to do.
But I kinda see what you're saying, the design is a little generic. But I also think the design is good, its functional, and it fixes the problems we have with the existing design. It focuses on content and displays it in a way that's at least a little aesthetically pleasing. I'd like to hear a critique that's a little less vague, but I appreciate the reference links.
From: Rochester, New York, USA Insane since: May 2000
posted 05-10-2004 06:16
Ok, so you completely missed the boat on what I was trying to tell you. If you got so far as to look at their content they actually did a better job than I thought they would. The point of those links was for the knee jerk reaction, you visit the site and say "Verb" type thing.
The problem is, you site doesn't say anything. Well it might say "Hello, I am a bunch of yellow boxes, on a brown background" but it does nothing more than that. You don't have a powerful logo, that is needed for branding purposes, unless you present a powerful enough presence to inspire, such as one of the earlier Ozones. If you pull that off then you have something. You will still notice through all the revisions the lettering of "ozones" has stayed the same. Otherwise you need to have some sort of branding. It doesn't have to be much more than you text, but it has to be special. The gurus network logo is similar. It is a static logo for the most part, with different skins. It keeps its identity.
I am not sure but I think I read somewhere that most of your clients are bands. If you want to continue to focus on this clientell you should design your site to focus on their types of people.
So now that I am verbose without saying much more than give your site and identity let me see if I can get down to the technical brass tacks.
The eye is generally trained to follow a web page much as a book, starting with the top left corner and working down and to the left. Notice down first, this is because we are used to print and the heading is on the top by it self and then we move down. So because of this you will want to catch the reader with your logo in the top left, and from this use design elements to push the users eye to your next important area.
In your design my eye goes Firefield -> Flash Movie : short stutter : -> featured build -> projects
You will lose a lot of people once they get to the flash movie if it hasn't loaded and doesn't offer something worthwhile to their search.
Personally I feel with this layout you have lost your visitor no matter what. They will completely miss the navigation on their first look, and they will miss your page content. The two key areas of keeping the visitor searching your page are missed.
Your design does not provide a context for the reader. Flash might be cool to use and fun to look at, but most often it does not provide any context for the user view. This is just where are the visual clues as to what I am suposed to be looking at next.
So for right now, context (where the user is on the page) and identity.
I am not sure what problems you have solved with this design, and the reasons that it is good. Could you reply with some of your planned vision on this one? Where do you see this going? What type of audience are you trying to capture?
Also what is your background in web design? Just because I am nosey.
Yes, the navigation definitely gets lost there... there is no direction, nothing realy to tell the visitor where they should start and where they should go from there...
quote:In your design my eye goes Firefield -> Flash Movie : short stutter : -> featured build -> projects
You will lose a lot of people once they get to the flash movie if it hasn't loaded and doesn't offer something worthwhile to their search.
The way we're going to do it, is have the navigation not be in flash, but instead load smaller, faster flash movies. This way you dont have to wait for long load times like there was on the previous build. the majority of the content is going to in the flash module. The problem with the eye following and losing the navigation would probably be best solved by moving the navigation from below the flash movie to on top of it, no? At least that way your eye goes from Header > Nav > Flash > and then to the featured build. The idea was that flash is an excellent thing to use in a website, but not as the website itself. So, sites like 2advanced, where the entire site is in flash (although genious and well crafted) could probably induce a seizure if you're not careful. So we wanted to do something not so ordinary in this design. And this way, with the seperate flash movies, we can make the site still load quickly yet still have a part of the design not static at all.
The real difference between us, and your links here, is they're charging 2000 dollars for a site, and we're just two guys trying to have a little fun, and maybe make some money on the side (like, 500$ for something like our site). You dont want to build your site and have your client want you to make a site like that and then not be able to afford it. But we're trying to make as nice a site as 2 teenagers with lives can. We can code anything, we can design anything, but not for 500$.
The box thing is something I like a lot, it shows you where the text is, where the content is, instead of having to look 90000 places for what you want. Everything is built around boxes, every website, we are just the ones who utilize the symmetry and the usefulness of boxes themselves. If boxes are what you think of when you come to our site, then it's better than not thinking anything at all, at least it's practical. But maybe, we can be futuristic and just add more bevels and make things shinier like the trend in most modern developing is. I suppose rounding out the module spaces couldn't hurt, and maybe I'll mess around with how the text will be displayed a little tonight.
I think the main issue that I need to attack with this build right now is maybe making the stuff on the right modules a little less wide than the content on the left, I suppose that would help in the viewer losing the content, and that way have some kind of dominance on the page.
The main thing we want to do with this siteis just to have a little fun, man, really. Just build a couple sites before we're off to college, make some spare cash maybe. But it's just me and a friend, and we just have fun designing. We wanted to use our web design site as a web resource also, which is why we created the forums and the message board, maybe pass on a little of our knowledge, stuff we wished we would have known when we started out.
As far as my background, I'd have to say I started with CG about 7 years ago. And I was graphics team leader all throughout highschool, with the exception of one year, but was a member. But I was really an artist, and I've been off and on for the past couple years, because my true love is music and I still play and practice countless hours a day, so that probably took away some time I could have been learning stuff. But I used CG primarily as an artform. My main focus is on 3D Modeling, and that's what I'll be majoring in as well.
[EDIT] Go back and look at the prototype again, I've worked on it some, and I'd like to see what you think of the changes.[/EDIT]
Whats with you and craming content into tiny boxes? You say you don't want to look 90000 places, but all you've done is squished your text into tiny boxes and created a half dozen different subsections of your website.
I think you're at a point where you need to decide whether this is a business site or a personal site. It really can't be both.
posted 05-05-2004 23:52
