flash jewellery site

[spherculist]

Right, the new wildcat promo site is almost up and running.

There is an A6 booklet at the printers which will be sent out to lots of customers.

This site uses the same graphics and the aim is that people can find stuff in the online shop quickly after looking through the booklet.

Most of the pages are close to finished, the nav buttons will change completely as will the preloader bar. I haven't put the links in yet to the webshop.

Would love to hear what you guys think, good or bad.

http://www.spherculism.com/wildcat/420/

[Superflymonkeyman]

Howdy doody...

First things first, I'm liking the no-fills, minimalist approach to the interface.. I think you said you were changing the navigation buttons, but if you're not, then I'd definately use a pixel / bitmap font, as the ones that you have at the moment are a little blurry at that size... I'm running a fairly mediocre PC, but I got some horrific slow-down... Is this going to concern the target audience?

Finally, because the load times are quite hefty for a low-spec modem, like mine (which is made from rocks and mud), I have a neat little trick for you that will make the loader bar a little more pleasing on the eye... To stop it from jerking across the screen when your percentage variable gets updated, why not use a bit of physics to make it glide as if it has mass, or inertia... The code is below;

Assuming you're using "_scale" to change your preloader bar, the formula is thus;

" new _scale - current scale / any number above 1 (the bigger the slower)

or - _xscale += (newScale-_xscale)/5;

If that was of any help... great! ... If not, it's a perfectly site anyways... Good Work...

[spherculist]

Thanks for the reply,

When you say 'some horrific slow-down' do you mean when the pages are loading or when you're using the magnifier to view the jewellery?

Thanks for the formula, it's identical to the one i use for moving the movie clips onto the stage, but i'd never thought of using it for the preloaded. Thanks.

If it's really crunchy tho i'm thinking... would it be better to do all the calculations for movie clip positions and store them in array before moving the graphics around on the stage? I've never used that technique but it seems reasonable. It's quite a problem because i'm at work on a pretty phat pc and connection, i've tested it another pc and it seemed to work fine.

I'm gonna completely change the preloader and buttons, although i agree that minimalist is best on this particular site.

Cheers,

matt

[Superflymonkeyman]

A couple of things to try in order to prevent slow-down;

1. bring the items onto the stage individually.
2. Make them appear one-by one already ON the stage? Use an alpha-white-normal transition or something... that should help...

Glad you liked the suggestions..

How would you like to do me a favour and take a critical glance at my own site? If so, the address is below. Get rid of the advert in the top-right corner, and don't try to access the last two sections (only the first two work presently)...

http://www.geocities.com/superflymonkeyman

Cheers!

[Abelius]

Hmmm...

Fonts too small...

What's with the humbers? I have to guess where i go when I click on the "2" or the "4"...?
And you have the link to "Home" in two places on the main page... One (or two) too many!

The transition is a bit slow from one page to the other if you ask me. Your main visitors (I think) are not philosophers or monks, with years of time ahead and Chinese pacience... Accelerate a bit!

"Untitled document"? Is that the name of your site? That's what my browser shows on top...!

[theswedishtiger]

I agree, the font is too small, and its also blurry. Needs a pixel font if it is going to be bold and small.

The magnifying thing is cool, but kind of ineffective. I would have much preferred a blown up image of the item, more so if I was going to shell out money for it.

[spherculist]

You guys crack me up,

the nav buttons will change completely as will the preloader bar.

Or perhaps...

I'm gonna completely change the preloader and buttons

It's fun to quote yourself

Superflymonkeyman: I really dig the style of your site. The navigation works well and everything runs smoothly. I like the way the headings pop up on mouseOver.

I really like how you've taken a still image and moved it around and played with it, looks very slick. Are the movements random or predefined? I did kinda expect them to move with the mouse on mouseOver but they are very cool as they are. (Definitely gonna be including something like that in my next site )

That first little vertical preloader looks a dodgy, doesn't seem to fit with the site for some reason. Minor thing tho.

The background is spot on, i love it.

One thought i had was that when the horizontal title bar moves up and down it looks very flat to the page because that outer shadow is locked to it. I think it would look great if the shadow moved separately to produce a little 3d effect. Like the title bar is hovering just above the page. I did something similar in this site. Mouse over the word Souk after the main site has loaded to see what i mean.


http://www.souktrading.info/

I think i know what you mean by an 'alpha-white-normal transition' but i've never used one.

Cheers,

matt

ps. i totally agree that the transitions take too long

[Superflymonkeyman]

Yup... A seperate movement for the bar shadow would be nice, but at this stage it would be an unbelievable hassle to detatch it... Good thought though... PS, yes the JPEG movements are completely random... If you'd like, I could send you the code that I use for my "movie boxes"... They tend to take around 10k max, but give the appearence of animated windows, especially if you use more than one image (like in the first image of the first section, in the classroom)... Anyways... Cheers for the input, and I hope everything pans out with your site...

Cheers!

[admedia]

The graphics are good on this site. I thought it could have moved along faster. After the initial page load... it sould move to some of the product graphics. Great work on all graphics. I wanted to see some of the products in full without the magnifying glass tool so a mouseclick action would have been nice at that point.

Overall excellent graphics. Not enough info on nav... of the text graphics I did see, I liked them. A little more info.

[Christofer.T]

the background 3d grafix are nice but the site it self is horrible in soo many ways. and i think you knwo it too.

[Fonetik]

Quite nice site!

I think the background under the jewelery should be more subtil... more whitish... don't forget that the main focus here are your client's products, so let's put them more visible by seeing less the background image.

:)

[Archimage]

The opening B/W Line graphik looks interesting, but for some reason I expected it to Evolve into your site graphic differently, just me I suppose. I get a lot of jerky motions when moving the mouse over the Items.

On clicking button 3 a nice page eventually appears and I immediately notice the Artwork (I wish mine was half as good). I would sugguest that the first thing I should notice are the Products. It looks lovely, but it's failure lies in it's quality(just too darned good).

The two big round "things" at the bottom L&R corners(page 3) did'nt do anything, were they supposed to? They certainly pulled my eye from the products so I thought they might be interactive in some way.

They greyscale background looks nice and sets IMHO an effective contrast to the coloured products. However I noticed that it fades and reappears with each navigation click. I was wondering, is it a part of the movie? or is it a separate Movie on a deeper level?

What would I do?

1. I'd fade the Greyscale background out so that it was more like a "faint watermark".

2. I would try altering the Artwork to a gryscale or B/W to give the Products more prominence.

3. The Wildcat Graphic has those two verticle lines down the center, I find that they break up the Impression of a "WIldcat" which the graphic conveys, maybe having them show through from a deeper layer without dominating the "Wildcat image".

4. When things are moving do it one at a time. I think that everything sliding in at once is the main reason for the jerkiness.

All said, I think it will work.

I have to say it again. love the Artwork

[spherculist]

Christofer.T thank you for your kind words, I tried to take a look at your website to see what a pro site looks like sadly all i got was this message "We're Sorry this account has been suspended" so i figure you're just a muppet with a chip on your shoulder

As for the rest of you, thank you very much for the feedback. This jerkiness really is a problem, and one that i can't test. I'll just crack on and see if i can improve things ~ to be honest my heart just isn't in this one.

Cheers,

matt

[spherculist]

Right, i've updated the site, taken out the magnifying feature which massively reduces download time. I've also done pretty much all i'm doing with the opening page.

It's all but finished now. Just gotta add the links through to the webshop and i'm done.

So the big question, is it still jerky on your machine? If so it would help if i knew the speed on your computer and how much ram you have.

http://www.spherculism.com/wildcat/420/

Any comments or advice?

Cheers,

matt