Website critique please - final stages

[phadam]

http://www.idpilgrim.com/mossweb7/

There it is. Finished the layout and now working on the final bits and pieces. I am going to go through the site page by page and fill in additional content and clean up EVERYTHING. I just wanted to get some outside opinions on what you think I should change, keep, fix, and any other opinions or comments you can give.

Also, I have been working on trying to get work done a little more promptly. I figure that obviously comes with more experience, but for you regulars on this, aprox. how long would it take you to clean something like this up? just a little curious

Thanks

 

[Consultant]

Giant FLASH fail.

You weren't paying attention in the past decade?

 

[phadam]

maaaayyy have missed the memo. i did catch that a lot of people on this site are not too fond of the flash stuff

 

[angelwatt]

There's no way to turn off music from the start, which means I quickly closed the window. Also, don't bother with an intro movie, it just gets in the way and most people don't want to wait around for a site to load. I don't care that it's Flash, that's your decision, though I block Flash by default.

 

[katy]

not keen on the navigation links and the way it re-organises itself upon clicking

 

[Cheffy Dave]

lose the number count up, waaaaay to bright towards the end of the video, if the surfing isn't about what you are about, or about your business, lose it, I mean do you make surf boards, rubber wet suits, in general I found it annoying, sorry you askedNever clicked past the first page

 

[Maxiseller]

Yet again, we're inundated with people slagging off your site when they probably couldn't put together a presentation that slick in a million years.

Anyway; congratulation on the site - the flash must have taken a long time and it certainly looks decent (aside from some pixelation in the graphics).

Having said that, as a member of the public I would struggle to get on board with the site mainly due to its long loading times. We know the downsides of flash (one is that google bots can't search properly) but maybe offering a non-flash version, tidying up the pixelation and making the load times quicker is a good place to start.

Hope that is at least contructive.

 

[phadam]

all good feedback and exactly what Im looking for.

I'll ditch the intro movie, and lose the count up. I wasn't too fond of it personally but the client was leaning towards it.

The music player I'll switch to on by click only. I can understand the annoyances on that one.

The pixelation will definitely get cleaned up. Just wanted to get some images up for a reference on how it would look.

Thanks, keep em coming! The more the better.

 

[decksnap]

It is kind of a usability nightmare. Flash tends to lend itself to that. I'm clicking through boards and it jumps to skegs, or to apparel, or to the menu, I don't know what the hell is going in. I roll over stuff and there's floating boxes and creepy music and where the hell am I again?

loading....

 

[Cabbit]

It looks pretty but i can't use it, my text reader can't pick out any text to read to me, and i tried some default commands like "link about" to see if i got anything out of it.

Could not see a button for high contrast mode ether and most people are not going to wait what i think was 20 seconds on a 20Mb/s line.

Accessible users are some 15% of internet users, dyslexic users could be as high as 40%. And the standard tools don't work with your site.

Make a HTML version i am pretty sure flash can output xml or something, and its likely you could make the site the same with html css and javascript.

Looking at the visual effects you can do the entire site with jquery effect for effect with the added bonus that the text will be readable by screen readers and the likes, more maintainable, and much faster to load.

Music is annoying as commented above, i tend to listen to my own music or my text reader when on the web.

 

[lionheartednyhc]

As a flash website, the design looks great.

As a website in general, meh. Like others have said, flash is not the greatest. And not just because it cant play on the ipad. It just sucks in general.