Comments please

talk design
1

I would appreciate any constructive criticism:

I just got my first Flash book a little over a year ago (and have been through a few more since), and had basically no Web Design experience before that, so ths isn’t going to be too advanced.

This is the start of a little site for a TV show that I made up.

http://www.loobis.com/braxtonfalls

Any comments would be welcome.

Thanks.

2

Well congratulations on your site so far. A job well done!

As for some advice:

First the color. The HTML blue works better [for me] than the blue you picked for you swf.
I think the SWF color should complement the surrounding color.

If Braxton Falls is your company name I would consider having it housed on screen all the time especially if your URL and your comp name aren’t the same.

The menu font is OK but it’s missing something? Maybe they just need to have a subtle separator between them. I think that the fact that they are just floating is what makes them look outa place on your site??

The animation seems quite slow. What FPS are you set to? I would recommend 32 FPS. Apparently that is a cross platform number that works the best [??].
You could definitely get away with speeding it up.

Your body text is OK, I probably wouldn’t have set it to bold. If you use a font like _sans it makes the text look crisp like on an HTML page.

Under the History button, the title A few words… could do with being set apart from the other text either by increasing it’s point size and/or changing the color.
Also, the first line doesn’t make sense to me grammatically.

I am assuming you will be filling the Cast section with images and bio’s. If this is the case then you might want to start splitting your site into separate load movies so that it doesn’t become a long load time at the beginning.

The first page you come to on your site [Home page] should be filled with content. Remember this is the first thing people see. With that in mind you should have loads of information/images housed here.
I, like so many other people am a very visual person. I only read one paragraph on your site and I still don’t know what it’s about really. If you add images with text on the home page then it will stimulate interest and/or curiosity. This will then make people want to learn more [if it interests them].

Keep up the good work :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for the response.

I originally had the HTML blue, but found it kind of flat. I am going to create some BG pics that may change depending on what page you’re on.

I agree about the menu buttons. they need something else.

I’m running at 12 FPS. I left the “wipe” animation kind of slow, because every different menu item is a seperate “loadMovie” command, so I wanted to give people with slower connections a chance to load the movies before the lines go back up, revealing the loaded movie.

Good call on the different font for the heading.

It’s already broke up into different loadMovies, and will continue to be set up as such for the loaded cast bios (once they are set up)

I’m leaving the first screen mostly sparse on purpose. My idea is that this is the website for a fictional TV Show. So, people would only really be going there if they already have watched the show, or have seen an ad for it. I don’t want to beat anyone over the head with the fact that the whole thing is completely fictional. I’m kind of hoping for the “what is this?” response, mainly due to the nature of the site.

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Thanks a lot for taking the time to look at the site, by the way.