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Can you check this out and tell me what you think?
http://www.catalyststudios.co.uk
I wanted to shy away from the usual 'parallel lines and pixelfonts' style of design sites, and as our studio produces comics and the like, went for a bright, comic-book-y feel. Let me know what you think!
What I noticed in no particular order:
1. Make the splash page smaller so that it fits on to one screen. You could also say how big the downloads are for the 56k and broadband sites.
2. Nice graphic on the loading screen, but maybe there should be some kind of loading bar to tell you that is what is happening. At first I thought that the link wasn't working, until i noticed the loading bar on my browser.
3. Never made it to the broadband site because it was taking so long to load, and thats on ADSL.
Shame really I was looking forward to it.
:(
OK, thanks for the comments! To reply...
1) I'll do that.
2) Which loading screen is that? There's actually loading bars for everything apart from the first few frames of the movie; first of all some text comes up, and then after a few seconds an intro sequence is loaded with its own loading progress bar... after that (or if you skip it) the main site loads, again with a progress bar...
3) Don't know why it was taking so long... the 56k site and Broadband site are virtually identical (the Broadband version just has smoother graphics on some of the elements), the former being under 300k (despite what the preloader says) and the latter under 700 (again, the preloader lies).
But I'll get onto my broadband-running friends and see if they have the same problems...
Can you try it again just to see if your connection was having probs at the time? I know my brother's sometimes does...
I do apologise... it seems there WAS a problem with the broadband movie... I'm not sure why, but once the movie was about 17% loaded the download always drops... for now, I've had to remove this movie until I figure out just what the hell is going on. The site is still there, and the index page has been updated so that only access to the low-quality version (without the traced bitmaps) is available.
Sorry!
Ok glad to know that I wasn't missing anything really simple. :confused:
This post is about the 56k site, as I have been looking at now. Again in no order:
1. I like the way that you can turn help on/off. Maybe it would be better to not have the help covering one of the options when it does pop up though.
2. Everything in the look works really well together, the style of images, the font the tone etc.
3. On the sketch book pages the purple boader you are using has rough corners, where they are meant to smooth (I assume). You could tidy those up.
4. There is loads of text to read about each comic. I didn't read it admittedly but if this can be cut down it should be. Screens are four times as hard to read from, as reading from paper, so I try to work on using a quarter as much text as would be used in print. This is obviously not possible in all situations, but I use it as a general rule of thumb.
5. Loose the counter. If you want to know how many people have been looking at your site then you should be able to view the web log of your server space. No need for any one else to know and it looks less professional.
6. Take off the links to other sites from your splash page. You don't want to send people away as soon as they get to you. Also will make the splash look more professional.
7. The text box scroll bar looks like it is shaded out and not "that colour anyway". I think it could be a little more obvious. Just a slightly darker blue would do it.
8. The links section could have some instructions on dragging the links in to view. I would guss that even an average web user would not try out dragging it, to see if thats works.
I have gone on a bit but I got into to looking round your site.
Good job on the whole. Looks different that is the greatest over riding thing.
:D