Hello, this is my first real website that I have made. I have done the buttons and the banner in flash along with the slideshows.

 

The "Featured Content" on the right is going to get removed when I finish with the graphic, I am working on a vertical flash banner for that.

 

Well I know this website is very far from the "normal" but that is exactly what I was shooting for.. I designed this website for my friend who is graduating from film school, so the content is somewhat "re-used" because I wasn't supplied with much at the moment.

 

 

Any advice or input is much appreciated

 

http://www.arcanesoftware.net/matthewbronner

Hey, I heard its good practice to add an alternate thing for the browser to display if flash is disabled. Especially if its something the site can't do without like the navigation links. The button hover effects are great. I think Javascript can give you a very similar effect.

I had a quick look at the source code. It's done very neatly! Have you tried using div tags with css? It can save you a lot of time and you won't have to use tables anymore. It will make the code much easier to edit later as well.

Edited May 16, 201214 yr by rrr

Hey, I heard its good practice to add an alternate thing for the browser to display if flash is disabled. Especially if its something the site can't do without like the navigation links. The button hover effects are great. I think Javascript can give you a very similar effect.

I had a quick look at the source code. It's done very neatly! Have you tried using div tags with css? It can save you a lot of time and you won't have to use tables anymore. It will make the code much easier to edit later as well.

 

Thank you so much for your input! Yeah I would imagine this website would look pretty nasty on a computer without flash, but I am taking baby steps right now . I am not very fluent with any of this yet so I will definetly do some reading into using div tags.

 

Thanks again for the suggestions, much appreciated!

The site is looking good, maybe it is an idea to make bigger pictures with the black background a .png. That would save space on the server because the background is already black. The picture of the church is loading really slow. For the rest the websites is looking great

 

One quick tip: If this website is meant for people to visit it and contact you then it is a good idea to make a simple contact form. You can just take one from google or something, people can give you a feedback on the website

I'm going to be honest and please do not take this the wrong way, I'm just offering constructive critism. The site looks dated, reminds me of my first site back in the late 90's. I really dont like the navigation, looks pretty poor and takes a lot of screen real estate. consider switching to a horizontal menu. You can easily achieve this with an unordered list and little CSS tinkerign. Flash is a dying technology, you can achieve simular effects using CSS and Jquery. When designing a site, one of the first things to do is think about your target audience, and for your sites audience I would be thinking iPads and other tablets, the majority of which don't support Flash. Also as said before your code is realy outdated, read up on CSS. This will not only speed up your workflow, but be more standards compliant. For instance when you use an external CSS sheet , you can make site wide changes by simply editing a single line in one file.

Hope this helps and if you need any help at all, please just send me a private message.

Honest crit, nothing personal:

 

Lose the Flash. It doesn't bring anything to the table in this particular site that couldn't be achieved with HTML, CSS and Javascript, and doing it that way would be more search engine friendly (search engine spiders work by following normal HTML links to discover documents, and by reading text to discover what the site's about. It's exponentially harder for them to do that with Flash).

 

Stylistically it looks very much like you're approaching the process of creating a website the same way you would an animation or a title sequence for a video. Web design has far more in common with print design than it does with either of those disciplines, so the best way to learn is to approach it from that angle - read up on grids and typography and design from your content out.