Online Shop (My First Site) - Part II

I worked a little with my first Flash (and HTML attempt for that matter) and added some increased functionality. Any feedback would be appreciated

www.maineislandillusions.com - wreaths and nautical decor

Recently added the UPS Package Tracking direct from the site. If you don’t have a UPS tracking number handy try this one
1zy306680395125134

Also, the Interactive “Build Your Own Wreath” is up and running as well as additional “Special Effects” when you explore some of the product images with your mouse.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
John

I like it. Some things I’d change are using just one font. Some of the pages (dancers) have smaller fonts than others (fairies). Don’t know if that’ll make the paragraph too big, but you have a lot of space on the left of the paragraphs to widen them.

Also, I’d add loading bars. I don’t know how long it’d take to load on a 56k, but it took me about 3 sec, so 56k’ers might have to wait a while.

The 2 angel things come out on mouse over but go back down on mouse click. Plus, both of them can be out, but you can only see one. You should make it so when one comes out, the other goes down if it was already out.

Thanks WarCow!

Surprising that it took 3 seconds for new products to appear. They load instantly on my machine and I’m on a 56k.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the “Dancers” do not have a directory of products, therefore when you click on that link, it shows an actual “product” rather than a “subdirectory”. The fonts used for each product are the exact same. Infact, its the same movie clip just with different parameters.

Once we get different types of “Dancers” and “Gardens” everything will have subdirectories anyway.

As for the Folders…
If you actually try to make them, you’ll find why they shouldn’t close on a rollOut. Leaving the folder open gives the user a bit of control and entices them to browse.

Closing one folder when the user opens another is MUCH simpler than using swapDepths to overlay the folders. But when we get more products and we have 3 folders, which one would get opened when the active folder gets closed? Anyway, this way is more like “real folders” and its kinda fun to make them work I think.

But most people think the “Angel of Peace” is more fun. :slight_smile:

Cheers
John

i like the how you dynamically feed the ups tracking info to flash.
How did you do that?. does ups offer a way to do that?.

pretty cool

Well, UPS doesn’t really give you an easy way to track packages directly from an outside website.

FedEx is much easier because they have a SOAP based web service which would have been real easy to tie into. But UPS only gives an XML request and response so I had to do a bit of fussing around with PHP to get the data. Placing the data into Flash was not difficult once I figured out how to get the requested tracking number to generate the response.

John

Nicely carried out in a flash site, I would change the font though.