fifeclub — Tue, 15 Jul 2003 03:59:23 +0000

I can see what Megan means by being generic. I'll even say a tad bland. But now I'll switch that around and say that's fine with me. You accomplished a clean and professional overall appearence and that's what is most important in my book.

I'll note that at 800 by 600 I got a Hscroll bar.

And now I get to the big stuff. Once your header finally loaded I thought it looked very nice. Polished. It impressed me with it's little into movie, as did the moving clouds that followed. Animated menu is well done but not necessary, and the beeping menu sound was annoying. However, in the real world I would NEVER have seen it! I would have left long before it ever loaded. I sat around for over two minutes with noting atop the page. My philosophy (not in web design but in my real world practices) is that if I wait over 30 seconds I'm out of there and you lost my business. Yes I've got a 56k but that's still over half the world so don't piss off the majority of internet users.

Ya gots ta get that page load time way down! Otherwise like I said, I liked the look, so good job in the design aspect. I wish that animation can stay because I liked that too, but IMO you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.

Megan — Wed, 09 Jul 2003 15:42:59 +0000

Thread title updated as per posting agreement.

Are you looking for a review of this as a customized site or just as a template? As a template it looks good (except for the big gap between flash section and first content box in Opera*). As a site it's really, really generic. Hard to know what exactly this company is about.

In general, I'm finding that the look is attractive, if generic, and the flash navbars are kind of interesting. However, if you're using flash for navigation you should really provide a text based alternative. In addition, I'm finding the sounds on mouseover to be really irritating. It might be better if they weren't so high pitched. The font size is also too small for large amounts of text to be read comfortably.

* okay, this is odd - when I visited the site a second time that gap is gone but there's a new one on the right side between the flash part and the right sidebar Could just need a valign="top" somewhere.