Flymachine Films 2005

[Flymachine]

I made this site using mostly layers, and I used some DHTML and Java, kept it nice and tidy, because its a big gfx site, I'm afraid it loads slow, please review.

FlymachineFilms (http://www.flymachinefilms.co.za)

Thanx
Wheeler

[ronaldb66]

Ooooh, Mystery Meat tonight!

Graphically, it's very nicely done, coding's a bit heavy on the abs pos but overall pretty neat. This: "font color="D3D1D1" " however is an absolute no-no! Apart from that it's wrong (it should be "#D3D1D1").
The body text gets pretty hard to read at the right end because of poor contrast; you could try to darken that area of the background some more.

Coming back to the Mystery Meat: don't make your visitors guess where the links are; if you must use intricate rollovers, at least give enough hints that those crosses are links, and where they link to (greyed out version of the text, for instance).
The scroll arrows could do with a lot more explanation, too, by the way: it took me a look at the markup to find out there there actually should be more content then was visible at the moment, and links to boot.

In short: very nicely designed, reasonably well coded -apart from the font elms, but useability needs work.

[Flymachine]

Thank you very much Ronald!

I agree fully, I battled with the text, but its as simple as changing the background colour a bit.

And the arrows, perhaps I should ad in there up,down and left right. People would see that right ?

I really like the crosses, I played around with text on them, but it just didn't look right. And small text under them ruins the complete look of the site.

Back to the drawingboard

over
Wheeler

[WebPlaya]

Just a suggestion...
There is no next or previous button on the gallery.. I love looking at pictures on diff websites.. but hate clicking back and going back to the menu and try to remember where i left off..

[mindlessLemming]

Your custom scollbar doesn't work in mozilla.... and, like Ronald, I didn't even realise it was supposed to be a scrollbar. :eek:
If fellow designers can't understand a UI element at face value, that may be reason enough to rethink your replacement of the standard browser scrollbar.
If you don't want that, make the content a variable height box by using a seperate div for the footer image and a repeating image (y-axis) for the content. That way long pages will be long pages, not short pages with hidden content.

[rmedek]

I really like the crosses, I played around with text on them, but it just didn't look right. And small text under them ruins the complete look of the site.

Wheels completely ruin the look of many a fine automobile, but without them all you have is a piece of art, not a car.

Just chiming in to reinforce mindlessLemming's and Ronald's points about the interface. It's important to design for usability, otherwise you might as well put up a .jpg and leave it at that.

Having said all that, though, I think the design is looking good and is very close...

[Flymachine]

Thanx for all the help!

OK, I changed all the text to #000000, looks much better.

I've added "UP" and "DOWN" on the scroll bars

I've added "NEXT" and "PREV" to the slideshow

I've added the names of all the galleries onto each gallery page, so the viewer can access any gallery from the current gallery he is viewing.

But, I don't know what to do with the crosses, any suggestions ?


over

[ronaldb66]

small text under them ruins the complete look of the site
I can't recall saying "small text"; I said "greyed out text". There's already a goast image of the texts visible; simply make that clearer, and make the rollover text stand out more than it does now (which is not very much, anyway).
There is NO excuse for compromising basic usability in favor of "The Looks (TM)", and Mystery Meat Navigation is one of the worst usability sins there is!

By the way: the dark body text is still not very legible; the background you've chosen makes it hard to find any color that will yield enough contrast from dark to light.
The only thing that would really help is to reduce the overall contrast of that background image, and either lighten it -so you can use dark text- or darken it -so you can use light text. Without compromising "The Looks (TM)", of course...

[Flymachine]

I've made all the buttons opacity 20, so they are slightly visible.

I made all the text bold, seems better to reed now ? I guess I'm too lazy to change the background colour now, witch is not a good thing.

Now for the million dollar question, how much would a site like this sell for ??

over

[rmedek]

Now for the million dollar question, how much would a site like this sell for ??

Well, honestly?

Cut and paste Javascript effects (that don't work in my browser), a dynamic scrollbar that doesn't work in my browser (cutting off half of your content), code that was deprecated almost ten years ago...

I'd say not much. ;)