Critique for a dog compeny website

[Ohls]

Got this up tonight and I'd like to get some critique on it. If you got the time please try and be more specific and constructive than "Great!" or "This sucks." if you got the time. I'm not one that gets hurt by harsh critique so bring it on :).

The site: http://www.hundsteg.se/

It's not 100% complete yet. I need to make the scroller more obvious and I want to add a mousewheel scrolling functionality aswell. I will also load the pages and pictures as a external .swf later on, I just haven't gotten it to work yet.

[albino]

I like the design, it's quite nice. You could maybe add some sounds to nav though, and also maybe some animations for the page transitions

[Ohls]

I like the design, it's quite nice. You could maybe add some sounds to nav though, and also maybe some animations for the page transitions

Thanks!

I don't know about sounds, I mostly tend to think they're annoying. And a lot of people accessing this site will be doing so through very low bandwith. Thats why I'm planning on loading parts of the site as you want to access them.

Animations. Yeah thats something that I plan on adding aswell once I get the loader to work proberly. I didn't wanna do all the animations now and then have to redo them later on.

[thats all folks]

I guess i'll be the first to ask why did you do this in all flash?

"a lot of people accessing this site will be doing so through very low bandwith" I think it would make more sense for html over flash.

Also I noticed that your bottom of your site seems cut off, the border doesn't completely go around

[Ohls]

I did this is flash simply because I don't know squat about html. I would do this in HTML with a flashnav if I could. Just to lazy to learn HTML. I think I'm gonna try and read up on w3schools soon though. Though I've been thinking that for ages haha.

Hmm I hadn't notice that untill you pointed it out. Anyone got a clue why that could be? It shouldn't be cut of like that.

[=guinness=]

for those of us who don't speak german, can you give a brief synopsis of what the company does?

if it is a dog related company there are absolutely no visual cues to that effect in the nav, butterfly, or logo (w/ the Disney typeface). Only thing I saw was a couple pics several pages in w/ dogs.

Logo is not a logo (a laurel does not make a logo).

Visuals look like 4 different trendart styles that you just mashed together and threw in... but they are not complementary. (poor hierarchy and information architechture).

Not a fan of the colorscheme, lilac and taupe don't seem to work for this content.

As stated above it's not neccessary to use flash for this. If your justification is for the rollovers, then make them memmorable, just a simple effect like the current would not warrant a full flash or even a flash nav really.

I know it's not much fun to have to pick up new coding skills if you're primarily focusing on a design position but hell, it's XHTML is more efficient for this stuff and most importantly, you still need it for content and positional CSS so bear down and learn it. If you're looking for some decent books, (yes, pay money and get books) the ________ For Dummies series is very reasonably priced and starts from a super basic knowledge.

I just wonder if I'm and idiot when a whole shelf on my bookcase is neon yellow dedicated to programming languages. lol

[Ohls]

First of all, thanks for the critique!

It's actually not german, it's swedish :). The compeny holds dog courses and lectures. She(being the only employee) also do some wolf research and hold courses to train other dog trainers. I can't put a dog or something like that in it, she said explicitly that she did not wan't the site to be dog theme. She wanted 'nature and some animal' on there. So thats why the butterfly and flowers are there.

I can't account for the logo, I didn't make it and she didn't want to change it. She has it printed on a whole bunch of stuff. Including her car.

Yeah I guess it really is. The flowers was what I had in mind from the beginning. Now, theres no possibly way I can draw an animal, I'm just incapable of drawing the damn things. So I found this free-to-use-for-anything butterfly and put it in there. In retrospect I guess I should have thought it throu more. Anyone got any idea on what I could put there instead? I can probably convince her not to put an animal up there. I'll just throw in some mumbojumpo about site design and she will cave in haha :sure:.

Pay!? A book!? Are you crazy? haha no, I do buy a lot of books. I guess I will pick up HTML for dummies then.

THanks again, I'm going hiking tomarrow till tuesday next week. So I won't respond here till then.

[BoonDock]

Need we say anything else after Guinness' critique?

The only thing I have to re-iterate is that I didn't see any need for Flash with this website ... I think in the long run that it'd just be easier to have this as a static site done with HTML etc. and then possibly becoming an easy CMS site or something to that extent if she ever got big enough to updated it constantly.