OK, after long and brutal days of working on my website. It's finally been perfected! I think I got this locked down. I just need you guys to tell me how it looks. Please go here and tell me how it looks. The color of the site changes every month so it never gets boring. I just thought I'd throw that in there. All future movies that I make link to Studentfilms. But tell me if there is anything I should fix? Thanks!

Really nice site as a whole but I think there's two things you should do:

No music when you come in- make it an option to turn on. It's cool but the loop can get frustrating and drive a person out of the site before they get a chance to familiarize themselves with the interesting layout.

Center it. Center the whole flash box or make it so the boxes show up in the middle instead of being all cramped in the corner.

The design is excellent and easy to navigate through but I suggest changing the image and movie icon- they're a little unobvious and those sections seem to be the heart of your site.


Great layout, great job, and good luck filmmakin' kid.

Thanks! That music option thing is really good advice, I never really thought of that. I just have one question. What do you think I should change the movie icon too? Do you have any ideas? Cause your right, I don't like it that much either. Thanks again.

yeah cool site dude, like he said about the looping audio, which you fixed already.

Also, I would maybe fill it out a bit more, with some Kazzam, if that was possible, because all you have is those four small icons on the side.

And, as he also said, i didn't know which icon was your movies or not, a good idea would be to change your movies icon to like a video camera, or a cassete, and have it so when someone puts there mouse over one of your buttons, a little message pops up that tells them what it is.

Anways great site dudE! L8ter!

Oh yeah, perfect, a video camerea, I kind of like that. But I like the cassete thing better. I was also thinking like a film canister or whatever. Maybe that too.

You really should compress your movie files more. I have a high speed connection and it still takes quite a while to download your nearly 150 MB files.

You know what I'm going to say... distracting flash stuff, content felt limited in format, etc.

The interface was confusing (i.e. not immediately and instantly obvious), repetitive (do we need to see the logo flash every time we go home?), slow to navigate (needing to click back before choosing another option is very annoying). It wasn't uniform throughout the pages. The content boxes were too small (why do we have to scroll a tiny box when there's so much empty screen space?), the type face was hard to read (and sometimes interpolated!)

Sound is a big no-no. It drives people crazy. Pages took forever to appear (and it can't be cause of loading times, this is flash with literally no content.) There didn't seem to be much worth looking at on the site either... like most of the pages seemed boring and I didn't bother clicking links inside them.


The site wasn't particularly cool looking. Just some orange boxes and a neat logo. Minimalist design is one thing, but if that's the route you're going down, don;t make it move and flicker.

I hope all this helps you out. I'm not trying to be mean. I'm a semi-professional web designer, and I've learned a lot about the profession.

One last thing, you;re still getting that page of code instead of the site now and then.

Good sig, Skaeddy... rock on Lake Woebegone!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: titaniumdoughnut,

i agree with TD. I'd go so far as to stay away from Flash.

I hate flash based sites, and honestly, as soon as I see one, I sort of take it significantly less seriously unless it's extremely well done.

Right. SOME flash sites rock, and actually use the medium for a purpose which is necessary. If it can be done without flash, don't use flash. Don't use what you don't need.

I dunno, flash has done great things to the website community, it makes stuff seem more alive. Plus, you really think that my website is distracting? Because it's not even complex flash or anything. I didn't use any rediculous scripts. It's just a button, and you click on it, more buttons and text come up, easy stuff. How is it not immediatly obvious what your supposed to do? There's only like 4 buttons on the screen, shouldn't it be obvious to click on them? Oh and I agree with you about the music part, someone told me that i should not make it automatically play at the beginning, and make it an option to turn on. What do you think? The menus that you click on shouldn't take long at all, the movie loads at the beginning, the music has nothing to do with it.

Those movies are old, I'm talking about 4 years ago kind of stuff. I know how to compress movies a lot better now. It's just that I deleted those movies so I can't re-compress it.

That page of code isn't my fault. It's my host, I tried talking to them about it, they said they can't do much of anything because everytime they go to the site, they don't see the code. It doesn't show the code on a PC. Only Safari on Mac. Do you have a mac TD?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Ryan Gordon,

FWIW I hate Flash pages also. If I want to play a stupid game, it's fine, but for a serious website, it had better be HTML.

Also, websites with sounds that automatically play bug the hell out of me.

I prefer solid color backgrounds, contrasting text, and a few pictures...

Well what kind of Flash sites do you guys like? Because I seriously, I'm better at flash then HTML and I would love for you to tell me what I should do. Your opinions and advice really mean a lot to me.

Ok, let me try to answer all the questions in order

Yeah, it is somewhat distracting. Mainly because it moves when it doesn't need to (for example, the page transitions), which brings us out of surfing the site to watch a (frankly not very impressive) animation. Even if the transitions were wicked cool I'd hate them, because they take up unnecessary time and delay my surfing from page to page.

It is not immediately obvious what each button does (I STILL don't know what each page was, and I need to try them again to find out) or what's on a page once I'm there. It's just a poor graphical user interface when you don't know what something does. Best solution would be to put text next to the icons, slightly worse but still useable would be tooltips that pop-out on rollover.

It is also poor GUI to require people to jump back before visiting another section. All user functions should be as streamlined as possible.

The music is just a bad bet, period. Having it off by default would be great, but I can promise that almost no-one would click it on. Think about it, would you turn the music on on someone's website?

Yeah, I'm on a Mac w/ Safari... that's really odd that your host can't fix that. I'd press them on it. It's definitely their fault.

I can't think of any flash sites I really liked off the top of my head, but what I'm getting at is that if you're going to use flash it should be for something that cannot be achieved in HTML. That's not to say do a lot of fancy stuff so you have an excuse to use flash, I'm saying if you NEED really fancy stuff, then use flash, otherwise stick to HTML and make some nice clean, fast sites with CSS, HTML and PHP. These things are definitly harder to learn than flash, but ultimately worth it.

Most web visitors don't want sites to seem alive. It's a gimmick. I want a site to present me with the info I'm looking for as quickly as possible, with as few limitations on viewing and use (flash doesn't allow interaction such as copy/paste with text, or printing). The more info per page, as long as its readable and flows nicely, the better. Scrolling tiny boxes and waiting for things to fly around is just distracting from the main purpose. I don't enjoy it.

Flash also has so few standards. I can't hit back (or the key shortcut) in my browser, I can't zoom in and out, I can't highlight text or copy pictures. These things all bug a bunch of visitors.

I really hope this is helpful. I'm not trying to bash your site.

I know your not trying to bash my site, your really helping believe me. But I'll keep trying to work on it, I also should know HTML by now, but I don't that much. So I'll get on that. Thanks though!

Good luck! Feel free to ask me any questions you may have. HTML isn't that hard, once you get started.

I used photoshop slices and frontpage and didn't have to learn a single code of HTML to get my site up and running. Not meant to be an advertisement (and the sites not even really complete yet)
My site: Foniqui

See? That site is a lot cleaner, and quicker to navigate. I felt like I was able to get from place to place with no distraction and no waiting.

While I'm nitpicking I'd say the article font being bigger was odd at first, and that the article should have spanned the entire page, without that wide right margin. There were artifacts around the media player logos, and the . before the name of the film lincoln lincoln was confusing. Also, the banner loaded twice (one in the home folder, and another in the full folder) Not that it really matters.

Ryan, you crack me up. I love people who endlessly self-promote and obsess over insignificant details that no one would ever care about like what color your site should be this month. Funny man, really funny. Ahh, good times.

There's really no need to throw insults into a helpful discussion.

I should add that was meant to be light-hearted. Sort of my humor . Cheers