I think I have done enough now so i can start getting some feedback but its not quite finished yet.
Things in particular - on the portfolio button, is the drop down menu annoying, do you have problems with it?
when you check one of the portfolio sub sections such as degree show - how long do the jpg images take to load? I would be particularly interested in hearing from those on dial up
Things you DONT have to tell me about - button effects will come later - preloaders will also be made later (but you should see things pretty quickly because file sizes are small)
On the portfolio button, is it supposed to animate on mouseover then go back on release? Or stay active while you’re mousing over the other navs too?
What I come across is when you mouse of it and go mouse over the other links it’s submenu stays active, until I mouse a certain area in the submenu it goes away.
yeah, its supposed to scroll down when you roll over the portfolio button and then stays down whilst you roll over all the buttons inside such as etchings, pda art etc. It is supposed to scroll back up when you move out of this such as going on one of the main buttons such as gestbook or contact and when you move down to the main body of the page where the content appears.
I might change it so that it opens when the portfolio is actually clicked and then have a small x close button so that a user can close it when they choose.
so its not working for you simplistic, oh! - I made it by following a tutorial here at kirupa, when you say a mouseout function, what exactly do you mean?
Well it looks like your using an invisible button or something. It looks like what you have is something like on mouseover goto and play frame and when you hit that inivisible button or something it tells it to go to another frame that has your closing animation. What you should do is, make that button MC, put the animstion in the MC and then attach this to it.
onClipEvent (enterFrame)
{
if (this.hitTest(_root._xmouse, _root._ymouse, true))
{
this.nextFrame();
}
else
{
this.prevFrame();
} // end if
}
that will play the animation forward and backward, instead of jumping to frames.
you are correct, it does use an invisible button to controll the closing animation. I will try what you have suggested in an experimental fla before i touch my real thing.
nice clean design. I think the portfolio choises should stay down until another menu button is selected so it’s easier to cycle through sections. Good color choise to match the artists work.
Perhaps you could add an on(press) function to the button to close the dropdown menu. I would add this to all the buttons infact. ie when I select about from portfolio, portfolio closes.
BTB simplistk, what’s wrong with using an invisible button as a rollover/out action? The forward/back makes sense if it is a keyframed animation, but what if he’s using actionscript to make the menu dropdown occur. Then it’s just one frame for the dropdown and one frame for the up. Since the up function need a bigger hit area, ie the portfolio choices, then the actual button I would guess that the button has the dropdown code on it and the invisible button the up.
What bugs me most about the site is that when you roll over one of the nav items theres not idication its a menu item appart from the annoying hand mouse cursor… i’d put like a rollover effect as simple as a text colour change just to show us that we’re on a menu item
The portfolio menu is cool but it feels a bit cluttered for me… needs more of a straight forward layout for each item instead of them being kind of everyone
The site all in all is very good but yeah those improvements would make it so much better