Feedback Appreciated

[BlueRhino]

http://www.faithbaptistwaterford.org

This is my first kick at the can. Haven't made a flash website before, so your comments, tips, pointers etc. are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Blue

[D-von]

its a nice design

the only thing ill say is that i found it to be a little too busy.
there were too mnay useless arrows, and stuff laying around...
i liked the dew on the leaf, but all that "clutter" made it not as nice

other than that, cool naviagation and neat site

[optical]

Certainly a great effort if this is your first attempt, well done.

I'd be tempted to increase the framerate as things run a little choppy. 24 or 36 fps will give the impression of smooooth motion.



Ian

[BlueRhino]

Thank you for the reply. It is indeed my first flash site. Love this program. There's so much more flexiblitly than plain ole' html.

Is there a way to check the framerate of your .swf files? I've opened all of the .fla's that I've used and they are all 24 fps. Perhaps I missed publishing one. Would a 12 fps mc in a 24fps environment drag down the rest?

Anything else that could be causing the choppiness if I have all the mc's set to 24 fps correctly??

Thanks in advance!
Blue

[bchalker]

Definately nice for a first site. I agree with the FPS comment - at least 24.

Other than that:

Maybe use a unembedded device or embedded pixel font in the scroll box...something that won't blur.

The worship music (which I am a fan of ) MP3 player is blurry. May need to look at the pixel placement.

Nice site...IMO, we need ALOT of better designed church sites out there.

[BlueRhino]

All the .swf's are at 24fps. I posted in the FlashMX section and someone mentioned the heavy alpha tweens may be slowing things down. There are a lot of those going on in the navigation bar. I may need to rework that. Thanks for the heads up on the blurry type and mp3 player.

Blue

[jforbis]

I would agree with rapdpirhanna...watch out for unused arrows. Other than that, I would say this is a very unique site and it really helps to build a new image of this said client. It moves the visitor away from any typecasts and inspires further navigation as opposed to moving on!

Well done...

[mg33]

This is just a personal thing, but lose the vertical text buttons.

<brief ramble> Vertical text works well in print, where you can physically move a magazine, book, newspaper, etc. to view text that is vertical. Computer monitors, on the other hand, aren't so easy to move 90 degrees to read things. So, without doing that, you're left moving your neck as close to 90 degrees as possible, causing brief pain and possible dizziness. I hate it 100 out of 100 times I see it.</over>

And where it is on your site, the font is blurry, a bit hard to read anyways. In fact, looking over the site most of the text is blurry.

I like the layout though. Nice use of pictures as background graphics.
I guess the only advice I could give on that would be to not go completely overboard making a site for people with cable modems or DSL. Do you have statistics available to you on either broadband usage numbers in your city, or specifically your church? Are there a large number of people who are going to be able to use something that is directed to faster computers?
I think a message board might be a good thing for a church, actually. Give people a way to keep in contact outside of the normal routine. Just a thought.

I think you need to work on your preloader too. Every time I open the site it gets stuck loading the background image.

mg33
Note: I don't read other site checks when looking over a site, so if you see something that's already been said, no worries.

[sintech]

I must say certainly the best church site I've ever seen , but the anitmation is really lagging all over maybe too much is on the screen at once or maybe you got a buggy script in there somewhere.Anyway, most church sites are very cheesy and poorly designed. Fix the animation and this will be the best

[BlueRhino]

Thank you all for the feedback. I do need to take a look at speeding things up a bit and making the type more clear. There is a sister 'low speed site' to handle users without dsl or cable and hopefully it will be well received. Still a lot of work to be done, but I'm encouraged that it's not a total wash.

Thanks again folks.

Blue

[dyldebus]

Hey BlueRhino, great first attempt! You should see my first flash site

A few comments.

Alpha tweens will kill a processor... ESPECIALLY if you have them on pictures the size of that leaf. Whenever you can fake it by using a tint tween DO IT! You'll save the processors poor life.

The vertical navigation... you should definitely make the hit area go down the bar... i sat there clicking it until I realized I had to click the little arrow above the bar to make it work

Text Area... very blurry font, and EXTREMELY compact text. I tried reading that message and i got lost a few times. you should make your text area a little larger if you're planning on using so much text.

Overall it's a great start. Time to fine tune and you'll have yourself a great portfolio piece

[BlueRhino]

Awesome idea on making the hit state for the vertical navigation go all the way down the bar....hadn't considered it! Kewl. Yeah, I've got some major tweaking to do. Fonts!! AAARRGGGHH. I have a few of the Fonts For Flash freebies. FFF Harmony seems to be pretty good. I'm having trouble picking a font size however. Recommendations in that area?? Font sizes for pixel fonts?? I run my monitors at 1280x1024 and almost every site I've seen with pixel fonts is impossible to read without changing the resolution dramatically.

Blue

[dyldebus]

if you go with dynamic text boxes your fonts will appear as they do on regular html pages (like this text). There are larger pixel fonts but the majority of people like to see how small they can get their type of course it looks nice and clean but it's really not practical... especially for a site like this.

Also, check out the new "super pixel font" from www.fontsforflash.com it's a little larger than the usual pixel fonts and is very clean.

-dylan

PS. email me if you need any font "help"

[wdperson]

BlueRhino,

Geez, first attempt. Wow. That's darn good. I agree with the others in setting the fps higher. Doing a good job. I like it. Things I would comment on. I clicked on "service times" and a window popped open. Then I selected a different section. The preloader overlayed the "service times" window. I would see about writing some script that would automatically close open windows when another section is going to be loaded or put a background on your preloader. Just a thought. It does drag on my pc and also I noticed when I was just looking around the content fades in and out. I don't really care for that.....my opinion 2 minor things....

great job.
wd