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Digital Duct Tape
02-16-2008, 10:11 PM
Just wanted to check in first of all to say thanks.

I just finished my most ambitious Flash project to date. Mostly, in the past, I've done a few things here and there when someone wanted a little animation or video added to their site.

The company I've been doing a lot of work for the past two years recently decided to redo their site. It's a cool company to work for, but their redesign was quite a bit past what their site has been in the past.

The design they put together was top notch (I think) and they wanted me to take their vision into flash.

So, of course, I say, "Yeah, I can do that." Then I immediately go home and try to figure out how to do it.

Now for the thanks. The deadline I was given was pretty tight and I didn't finish until 7am Friday morning (Deadline was actually Thursday midnight, but he gave me until 8am).

There were the typical moments of panic late into the evening but in the end, I think it was fairly successful.

Of course there are the few usability issues to work out. People are having trouble getting used to the back button taking them completely out of the site. I still am not satisfied with the way that the contact and login forms work with HTML and I still haven't tested it on a low bandwidth connection (weird that I don't even have access to one :|).

Oh yeah, the thanks.

I would not have been able to pull it off had it not been for this site. It's amazing how much this thing shows up in google on every problem I was having. So, from the bottom of my heart: THANKS actionscript.org!!!!

Oh yeah, here's the site:

http://www.oldhatcreative.com (http://oldhatcreative.com)

Of course, I welcome all feedback.

Check out the about us section. It's my favorite. You might recognize that from a tutorial at gotoandlearn.com.

And, if I'm not making any sense, blame it on the lack of sleep the past few weeks.

Anyway, with all the lurker help I got here, I thought I'd join and say thanks.

Freki
02-17-2008, 09:13 PM
Pretty site! The main problem I see is in the way the site loads. I'm new to flash, so I really can't offer any fixes for you. I can just point out what bothered me as an internet cruiser. ;D

There are plenty of preloaders there for loading the main pieces of the site (top nav buttons), but a lot of the sub menus don't come up for a long period of time. And there's nothing there that let's me know to wait patiently. For instance, the first time I played with this site, I gave up in frustration - the Print nav brought me to a section that claimed I could click the thumbnails below, but there were none there. The About Me was just a blank box, and lots of the other sections were missing things. (I'm on DSL, btw, just a step above dial-up... ;D)

BTW, this time when I browsed the site, it did eventually bring up one person on the About Us carousel. Woo, I like it! But again, slow loading. The people showed up really slow. And at first, as I pulled up each person, all I got was a text title. It wasn't until a good while later that I pulled one up and saw they had cards.

And shoppe was the slowest of all. I was already back to this forum and typing this post when I decided to check it one more time. And yep, it's there. ;D

Nice site, but like I said, I think for the average person it has some load issues. Once it's completely loaded, it runs great. I didn't see any glaring navigation problems. It's visually appealing (something I can never seem to do... ;D) Good work!

Freki