Site Review / Flash Help - Art Gallery - Artzyard.com

jordanmcclements · #1 (**permalink**) 05-07-2008, 05:47 AM

Please give me some feedback on ArtzYard Art Gallery

I am very far from being an expert in Flash, although a while back I did invest in Swish Max - which I have to say is very good value for money, and very powerful (although it could be a tad easier to use for newbies)..

I shied away form using flash for a long time as I felt it usually did not add anything to a web site.

But recently a client wanted a simple slide show type thing on the home page as they had seen this done elsewhere on similar sites.

I am quite pleased with the result personally.

I have also made an effort to keep the code as clean as possible - here is the relevant bit below:-

<div id="rightimage">
<object
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="john-mcsorely-art-movie.swf"
width="240" height="328">
<param name="movie" value="john-mcsorely-art-movie.swf" />
<img src="john-mcsorely1.jpg" alt="Painting By John McSorely" WIDTH="240" HEIGHT="328" />
</object>
<P ALIGN="CENTER">Pictures in an Exhibition, John McSorely,<BR>14 June – 9 July 2008</P>
</div>

The home page works perfectly in IE7 and Firefox on Windows Vista.

It also works perfectly on Firefox, Opera, Safari on Windows XP.

The ONLY fly in the ointment for me is IE7 on Windows XP..

For some reason, just for a split second, before the slideshow starts, I get the following :-

Which is really bugging the hell out of me.

Is there a simple solution to this?

I don't really want to spend hours messing around with scripts etc...

Any help is much appreciated...

arthurakay · #2 (**permalink**) 05-07-2008, 03:22 PM

Well... my first impression is that it's not bad.. but not good either.

I would hope that a website about an Art Gallery would be... more artistic.

1) Your background image doesn't do anything for your site.
Personally, I'd remove it altogether and use a solid background color

2) I like your Flash image fade. Good size and placement.

3) Your "Artists" page takes a while to load... you need to optimize those images,
or just do something else entirely.

4) Your "Exhibits" page is also pretty long. Why not give each exhibit its own page,
and just list each one with a link on this page?

Your site is pretty simple, but I guess you don't have enough content for it to be much more interesting.

Let's put it this way... if I wanted to know more about your gallery it's not bad. However, if I just stumbled across it while surfing the Web, i probably wouldn't stay long.

jordanmcclements · #3 (**permalink**) 05-08-2008, 06:11 AM

Thanks.

I agree about the background, and agree it is not the biggest, best, state of the art web site - but neither was the budget!

mtheory · #4 (**permalink**) 05-08-2008, 10:03 AM

IMHO If the site is showcasing art then the biggest piece of "art" on the site shouldn't be the logo.