First Post - First Flash Site -

[countSlackula]

This is my very first post on Kirupa - or anywhere else for that matter. I've spent the past few months living on the tutorial pages and being a total forum voyer. At present I have a site that is live but still needs alot of work. It's bitmap heavy so if you're on dial up you're JWF.

http://www.michelleleighmusic.com

This site has a main swf (logo, border, navigation, background and audio player) that loads external swfs into a container with a midframe transition method. Thanks to Kirupa, Senocular, LostInBeta, Voetsjoeba and a host of others for getting me this far with their tutorials or forum posts.

I would welcome any advice, critiques or ideas you have for this site. The following are some issues I am working on:
-redundant transitions (same left to right sweep of the jeans)
-unnatural tweens (haven't tweaked the easing)
-large file size (have optimized bitmaps individually)
-preloaders on external swfs
-redundant bitmaps (jeans images on main swf AND external swfs)
-would like to edit the content text dynamically through XML
-It is currently resizable but I would like to set a minimum size that it can be scaled

Thanks for your time

[.fee]

Hey, just something I noticed, at first when I clicked the about page it took it a looong time to play the jeans ripping, but then after I played through it once now it's fast(I guess it must load as it's playing, it definitely needs to preload).... Also I think you should be able to get the size of that site down and just preload the whole thing except the wallpapers and headshots(just make a little preloader for each of them)....
Also when you go somewhere the jeans pan out of view pan back in, and then dissappear for a little bit and then come back in, it's kind of jarring...
I had to wait for awhile for each page to come in, which would be okay as long as you have a preloader, but as it is now I clicked around a bunch of times thinking the site was frozen or something(of course I'm not very patient either :D)

Anyways, very good for a first site! Keep at it :)


EDIT: I forgot, the preloading bar didn't do anything the second time I loaded your site, but I "think" it loaded the first time.....

[CreationsCentre]

Wow... you say this is your first Flash site? For a first - that's a WOW! Well done. I noticed that your initial preloader loads to 100%, but the bar only fills half way when it loads. Maybe you could also up the frame rate a bit, because some of your transitions are looking kind of choppy. But apart from that, I can't see anything else right now (I just woke up lol). Once again great job! :D

[Samurai]

everyone...seriously....everyone get up and clap!

first flash site? either you're lying or you spent a million years learning how others do their sites by copying them and then used all that knowledge to become what you are today (or that just could be me), or you have a great eye for flash design.

but for a first flash site, that was well done, that site, with a few tweaks and a few added bits is easily light years ahead of a lot of sites I see online now.

In my opinion:

1. it definitely is a bit rough around the edges, animations aren't amazingly smooth, and some visual/code hiccups are apparent (the jeans kind of flicker sometimes like they are there then disappear for a second).

2. The design is well thought out, but I believe poorly executed. I think I know what you were aiming for, but some attention to details, the paper animation is well executed coming from the pocket to the forefront, and the audio cassette is nice too, but watch your masks.

3. the menu i find the most boring part of this, it seems to just be slapped in the bottom corner....why? why not make it more themed like the rest of the site? maybe you can have the person wearing the jeans (which I can only assume is the girl) have her foot up showing the bottom of her shoe, use that graphic as the bg for that menu, or have her shirt sleeve as the bg, or since you're going with the crumpled paper/high school note in math class look, why not make a notepad as the bg for the menu...something that makes the menu more a part of the site and give it more emphasis.


other than those small things (and believe me those are small things), you've got a great start, just work on the details and the interface, try to pretend that you're the target audience, how would you feel after/during looking at the site, compare your site to other sites that are in the same theme/topic as yours (designers hate doing that but it's necessary imo).

[hybrid101]

that's a too cool site for a first, grat work. lots of potential in you:D
only probs i have would be with the pic on the top left. it has some really jagged edges;)

[countSlackula]

Wow - thanks to everyone for taking the time to check out my work in progress.

-.fee - yeah, I think it would be better to load the whole thing first, I hate the fact that the jeans disappear - really throws off the continuity. I was working off of the "external swf with transitions" tutorial (which is fantastic) but may not be the best solution for a bitmap heavy project.

-CreationsCentre - I noticed that preloader glitch too - have to disect the code on that. Right now my frame rate is 30 fps - I think the choppiness is a combination of large size and and the fact that I haven't really fine tuned the tweens. I don't know but "bitmap caching at runtime" sounds important - but have to learn what that is =)

-Samurai - thanks for the clap! (waitaminute ;) ) and no - not quite a million years (I have several flash guys chained in the basement putting the AS in the basket)
1) Again - hate the fact that the jeans flicker - I should probably load all the jeans bitmaps in the main movie
2) Hard to tell at this point but ideally it should look like as you're clicking the different pages the camera angle just pans around to the different parts of the jeans before they either animate or sweep out of frame. As far as the masks - scratched my head for a bit until I learned that you can't apply a mask to a guide layer directly (made the guided elements into their own MC.) On the opening animation they are cut off on the top. I would like to resolve this by aligning the flash element to top within the HTML - however I have this set to scale so that represents another hiccup.
3) The navigation is a little tacked on at present. Keeping with the idea that the jeans elements slide in and out of view using something like a note book would probably work better than the shoe since it wouldn't be attached. Eventually (skill and time permitting) I'd like to allow the persistent elements (tape, navigation & maybe polaroid) to be moved around by the user - but I'd have to wrap my head around that for some time.

-hybrid101 - thanks - yeah - I've been experimenting with different formats (gif,png etc.) to reduce that but no luck thusfar - something about the angle it's set on. I'm thinking I should leave a slight dither on it - better to be a little fuzzy than jagged as al hell :)

And again - thanks to all for the replies and advice.

Someone let a FNG (me) know what the preferred reply method is - all at once like I've done here or several individual replies.

-Mick