xplored.eu

[launcher]

Xplored - photos taken in magic, haunted and unusual places: castles, hillforts, abbeys, roman ruins, stone circles, long barrows, caves, etc... 17th-19th century engravings which can be viewed in high resolution at variable zoom. Access by search engine or galleries catalogue with places sorted by location. Each object with its own map of location (road map, satellite and hybrid views). Color Mode feature which allows to switch between Black & White, Sepia and Color modes.

http://www.xplored.eu
(http://www.xplored.eu)
Updated version with added home page.

[thats all folks]

Pretty cool, just not a fan of the roll over sound!

[duncanhall]

Overall, a very well made site, but there's quite a few things that let it down in my opinion...


Get some content for the 'home' page - even if it's just introductory text. Just something that tells me what the site is about. If I hadn't read the description above, I wouldn't have a clue what the site was all about.
The bottom nav link - 'Xplored' is very close to being cut off when viewed with in FF with a fairly standard extension set up (tabs open, and google toolbar present).
Even worse than that, is trying to view the site in 800x600 - it's completely impossible. Do you really think you can afford to lose that whole section of potential viewers? Even if you do, I don't care - accessbility is king.
When viewing a photo from the gallery, a small contextual menu appears above the image, giving options to view other images in that set. Hovering over the "<" or ">" arrows reveals a tool-tip which gets cut off by the top of the browser and is not visible. Floating the too-tip below the mouse rather than above it would solve this problem.
In the same menu area, my initial thoughts were that clicking the ">" arrow would show me the next image in the set. Instead, it shows me a link to the nexr images in the set. This doesn't seem very intuitive at all. Why not have more than a maximum of 5 links displaying at once? There is more than enough room.
The scrollbar that appears on the "galleries" section could possibly do with some subtle up/down arrows at each end to make its purpose a little more obvious. It was not that easy to spot at first.
Some of the transitions between sections can be a little jerky. eg, looking at a map, and then clicking on "guestbook". (this could be my PC, but it might be worth doing some tests to see if the frame rate needs increasing)
The highlighted text colour on the contact form should offer more contrast. The black on black is very hard to define.
The 'send' button on the contact form needs to be a lot more prominent. I very nearly gave up trying to find it.
Auto insertion of date and time in the guestbook feature does not seem to work. - 'undefined' is repeatedly displayed.
Search feature does not seem to work - searching for "castle" does not return any results, yet there are several images with "castle" in the title.
The 'xplored' logo should be a link back to the homepage, if there is one.A very nice site, it just doesn't quite feel like it's finished as you are obviously capable of great things with Flash.

[hybrid101]

put some lorem ipsum stuff on the homepage just to test how text will look like;)

duncanhall pretty much said everything;)

[launcher]

First of all - thank you very much for your feedback (duncanhall - I'm impressed).
No time for sleep, but ...updated version online. :)

thats all folks

- I didn't change the sound but I made it smoother and it's no longer so loud

duncanhall

- content for the 'home' page - voila! Done.
- min. resolution is 1024x768, optimal - 1280x960+ ...so far; I have some idea (resizing images) but ...have upcoming deadlines as well, so this unfortunately must wait
- transitions & framerate - checked out. It needs fast CPU, in spite of using Fuse which is relatively fast (in my opinion)
- selection color - searched help and google, etc. ...and have no clue how to solve this problem ...so far
- date insertion - heh, thanks testy testerson ;) - now it works. Simply forgot about adding .toString() in some function. No more 'undefined'
- search - simplifying, now it compares entered string to the beginning of each item. I'll fix it ...in queue now.
- xplored logo - it works as a link to homepage now
- all of the rest - considered/in queue

hybrid101

- done... some kind of 'lorem ipsum' :)

[TheCanadian]

Man, that's one of the best designed sites I've seen in a while. 5 stars from me :thumb:

[dreeft]

Very nice. Logo is sweet.

[duncanhall]

The homepage image looks nice, but I'd still like a bit of text. One possible solution would be to lose the 'Xplored' section and use that as the content for the homepage. I think that content would work well as an introduction, and it would also solve the problem of the 'xplored' nav button being almost cut off by the bottom of the browser.

Another thing I've just noticed is the draggable engravings. If you choose to view any engraving, there is a feature which allows you to zoom/pan across the image (which works nicely). However, you can drag the image when it is at full size (ie, when it has just loaded), and it is possible to push it off stage such that it is unreachable again. Simply preventing dragging of images that are at default zoom level should sort this out.

Other than that, I'd say my single most important point would be to make the 'send' button on the contact form a lot more noticeable. You want to make sure people can tell you how great you are, right?

I also tried to see if I could send your database a bit mental with some MySQL injection type stuff in your guestbook, but you get extra points for this because you seem to have prepared for it!

Final, major criticism: Get some pictures / engravings from Surrey! :beam: