My newest site, I'd like your opinions and help debugging

talk design
1

Hello everyone! I’ve been lurking around Kirupa for a few weeks now, learning sooooo much. It’s a wonderful forum! I got Flash 8 a month ago and have been going at it since. I’m fairly new to flash and a complete noob to actionscript, so I know there are some bugs and errors in my site. I’d like some assistance to clear them up. Alot of the features were learned from the tutorials here, and some from other forums.

Please let me know what you think of it! It’s my very first flash based site, though I’ve been using MS FrontPage for 6yrs. If you can see anything that needs to be changed or would look better another way, please point it out. The site is for a customer of mine that does custom automotive camshaft grinding.

http://www.trollmedia.com/colt-cams/index.html

The link to the .fla file is here, but when I click on it all I get is a page with a bunch of garbled characters…?? It seems to freeze my mozilla for a few seconds too, I lost my first itteration of this post that way. Is there a better way to post .fla files?? It’s about 9 megs.
http://trollmedia.com/colt-cams/flash/flash-colt-cams-website01.fla

So here are the big bugs that I can see… When you are on the “contact” page and the “camshaft profiles” page, the top menu stops moving according to the mouse position. It must have something to do with the contact form and the drop down file system, but how do I get around it?

The contact form doesn’t work, but with a bit of tweaking I think I can get it to work. It has worked before, I just messed it up somehow. Not a huge deal at the moment.

Also some people that I’ve showed the site to found the top menu to get annoying, what do you guys think? With flash I’ve realized that there’s a fine line between awesome and annoying, and the end result is usually a compromise.

On “camshaft profiles”, I believe I got that file system bit from the tutorials section of this site. It uses a very simple XML file. Is there a way I can change the action script so that you can click on the folder and title to activate the dropdown? Cause right now you have to click on the arrow, and everyone I’ve showed it to never does that because they instinctively click on the folder or word.

Reload the page, I’m not tooooo impressed with the way the logo just drops down like that, kinda hokey. It was the first thing I did and I haven’t messed with it since. Got any suggestions for it?

Very soon I will be adding an intro page (you will need flash8, enter, etc) which will go to a quick video of a solidworks animation that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Here’s a quick teaser of what the animation looks like. When it’s going the cams and gears rotate and the lobes of the cam pop the valves open, it’s pretty cool, all perfect scale too. The cams are from a Volvo 850 if any car buffs were wondering. I’m a huge volvo nerd, 240’s are my car of choice.

Thanks for looking guys! Any help will be much appreciated! I’m sure I’ll be using this forum for a long time, it’s wonderful.

John
The Aspirator

2

IMO it looks too much like you stitched it together with tutorials, which you did, which isn’t wrong, but the design is lacking.
If it were me I wouldnt even THINK abuot using the built in Flash components unless I skinned them.
All in all, the overal design and feel needs refining but it works fine the way it is now

3

as long as it works, it’s fine with me. same as faster, don’t use the components. really destroys the atmosphere of the site. you’d rather code them.

4

Thanks guys! I envy those of you who can write actionscript (or any code for that matter) off the top of your head, it’s just not one of my skills yet. I can edit what I find, but that’s about it. Since I’m so new at this I’m not sure what you mean by skinning the flash components…? And specifically which components are you guys reffering to? The more specific you can be the more grateful I will be! :beam:

I’m so used to FrontPage where most sites are pretty “typical” in layout, using Flash you can do ANYTHING, so I think it’s overwhelming me a bit. I have tons of ideas of things that I want to try out for the site, but I have NO idea how to implement them. For me to try and write actionscript off the top of my head, I might as well be trying to write chinese. So at this point for me, unless I find the code and can tweak it, the built in stuff will have to do. But I am learning! Gimme a few months more at this and I’ll be doing much better.

Does anybody have suggestions for how to get rid of the bugs on the site?

5

Since I’m so new at this I’m not sure what you mean by skinning the flash components…? And specifically which components are you guys reffering to?

Were referring to ALL the components

search the built in actionscript dictionary for “Skinning Components” and youll find out how to change the appearance of all your components so that they fit into your site more…
eg: www.february-stars.com i used a scrollbar component and skinned it so that it looks good on the page

6

Yeah, you can look in[COLOR=“Silver”]joshuajonah.com[/COLOR]the kirupa tutorials, there is[URL=“http://www.joshuajonah.com”][COLOR=“Silver”]joshuajonah.com[/COLOR]a good tutorial on skinning[URL=“http://www.joshuajonah.com”][COLOR=“Silver”]joshuajonah.com[/COLOR]components
[ot]nice shameless self-promotion:D[/ot]

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THAT MENU! :ogre:

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whatever man, it was the simplest example i could think of

9

[ot]lol… i’m just toying with ya, don’t freak out:D[/ot]