I would really appreciate some thoughts on our new site. I will launch
the html version very soon. But at the moment, it is in Flash. Please
fire away with all possible thoughts, remarks, and suggestions -
whatever harsh they are.
All comments will be greatly appreciated.
www.jrdesignstudio.com
If you'll accept a non-expert's view as well:
I also thought the man at the beginning was telling me I don't have
the correct version of Flash installed. Unfortunately after that you
give visitors something that's effectively a splash page before it
transitions into content. Making visitors click/wait through two
steps before getting to the site proper can't be a good idea,
especially when the first step may well make them think that the site
is broken or their browser won't be able to handle it.
With Javascript disabled your site is plug-ugly, but perhaps that's
what you mean when saying that the HTML version is yet to be dealt
with.
The "Stop" and "Play" buttons at the bottom-right of the "intro" page
are pointless.
The logo at top-right looks like a series of buttons (but isn't). The
combination of purple (used only here) and green (used here and
everywhere else) is jarring to me. The text below the "buttons" also
looks like it should align with them, but doesn't.
The "sliding" green bars when moving the mouse pointer over the menu
at top-left are needlessly distracting, and don't move in an intuitive
direction when moving the mouse pointer between options (they seem at
times to be moving "backwards").
For some reason in Firefox Ctrl-Page Up and Ctrl-Page Down won't
navigate away from the tab your page is on. Maybe it always does that
with Flash-based sites, I don't know.
The text showing the e-mail address after clicking on "contact" is
selectable (which is good) but the text showing the 'phone numbers
isn't (which is bad). You talk about offices in Oxford and Hants. but
give an address for neither, and the telephone and fax numbers are
only for the latter location. The contrast between text and
background on your contact form is also extremely low, making the text
hard to read, and indeed the "SUBMIT" button is almost invisible to my
eyes.
You use a reasonable font size but nevertheless don't provide any
option for people to increase it if they wish to. Do you only want to
attract business from people with 20:20 vision?
Only after several minutes did I realise that the boxes on the right
were clickable!
I do actually quite like your site but the Flash is just overused.
I'd restrict its use for the "frippery" on the right and keep the core
parts of the site in HTML. That would also have the eminent advantage
of not having to duplicate your site for HTML and Flash versions,
would mean that URLs that search engines know about (via what's now
the separate HTML version) would correspond to the URL for the page a
human visitor will see, and would mean that individual "pages" would
be bookmarkable.
