Hey folks,

I've been developing a website (flash for heaps of cool animatery type things) for the rockabilly band I'm playing in (the Blue Cats).

Just want to get an outsider's opinion and to see if theres any problems with it on other peoples computers or things I could improve on.

All of the non-standard fonts *should* be embedded. If theres any Arial or Times New Roman please say so coz I may have missed a text box here and there.

Anyway, what do you think? The 'pages' are external swf's that can be any height (shows a scrollbar) and news/gigs/photos use xml for their listings.

EDIT** Heres the link woops http://users.tpg.com.au/thre3dee/bluecats/

Cheers.

What do I think? I think you forgot to give us a URL.

and the link is ???

F5

oh and some of the content isnt quite finished (such as the gigs listing)/

last edited by ³dee at 19:09:05 01/Jun/08

that's an awesome site! very original. love it

Very good for a flash site, only thing I didn't like was that the scrollable areas don't act like a real scrollable area; you have to drag on the scrollbar and can't just use mousewheel or any keyboard shortcuts to scroll through the info. You can't even click on the scrollbar :( Limitation of SWF I guess, but you may be able to hack something together by trapping mouse/key events.

noone says "on the web" anymore


and under construction banners are so tacky

+1 on scrollable area

Are you a furry?

did a quick look.

Would be better if the mouse became a hand when scrolling

it'd be better if your hand became a mouth while tolling

just a tiny thing, no biggy, but the part where you click on the song to listen, you should make the text clickable, not just the record beside it (for the internet uninitiated)

yeah i had to hand make the scroll bar. I spose I could be less lazy and make it work better.

Good idea with the music clip button. The site's gotta be funky and animatery-like but still newb friendly.

Lol under construction sign

Doesn't work at all with no script (would mean it doesn't work with screen readers or lynx too) so I give it a 0 / 10


See closed source security hole as to why I don't like sites like this

Looks good, but might want to make a site that will work with Search Engines.

keep the menu flash, but make the site out of html code/graphics to make it far more accessable. That way the whole page can scroll (dont use frames)

last edited by scuzzy at 09:15:58 02/Jun/08

from an aesthetic point of view, i would do something with the background, ie put the site in a picture frame and make it look like it is hanging on a wall, with wallpaper.

the blank blue background is a bit dang, needs more.

Doesn't work at all with no script (would mean it doesn't work with screen readers or lynx too) so I give it a 0 / 10

See closed source security hole as to why I don't like sites like this

Well, I never designed it for 'screenreaders' and console text only browsers. Its meant for normal browsers. The script code was generated by dreamweaver cause it wouldnt display properly in certain browsers for whatever stupid reason.

What closed source security hole are you blabbering on about? The site is meant to interesting and old school. The whole thing is, if you don't have flash, DOWNLOAD it.

from an aesthetic point of view, i would do something with the background, ie put the site in a picture frame and make it look like it is hanging on a wall, with wallpaper.

the blank blue background is a bit dang, needs more.

Yeah the picture frame sounds like a good idea. It always looked a little odd just sitting there in the middle. Also I could probably make the cat full visible (its tail is cut off).

Looks good, but might want to make a site that will work with Search Engines.

keep the menu flash, but make the site out of html code/graphics to make it far more accessable. That way the whole page can scroll (dont use frames)

I understand certain problems with all-flash sites but I'm not about to completely redesign the whole website to make it less dynamic and more search engine friendly. The website is probably going to be referred to directly by word of mouth or business card or via the album (not released yet though). There isn't a great deal of content so the mini-swf pages are fine for what it needs.

last edited by ³dee at 10:17:00 02/Jun/08

Alternatively, I could have both HTML and flash versions and it defaults to flash if its installed otherwise asks if you wish to install flash or just go HTML.

Pretty nice overall - I love how unobtrusive the player is.

I do agree with whoever commented that the text on the songs should be clickable, and the cursor should ideally turn to a hand when mouse-over the scrollbar. It would also be cool if scroll wheels worked in it.

Edit: TPG Icon too haha

What closed source security hole are you blabbering on about? The site is meant to interesting and old school. The whole thing is, if you don't have flash, DOWNLOAD it.

It was a hole in flash that could allow execute code. Aparently it was being used to steal mmo logins.

How do we know that this site isn't that or a goatse pop up...

The lack of content not requiring flash/scripting was not enough to encourage me to turn on scripts.

I'll keep noscript. Bring back animated gifs!

Paranoid much

Lol you and your console browser... tsk tsk..

So:

• Make scrollbar work properly + hand cursor
• Music name clickable
• Possible HTML version
• FixedSys console version for Obes

last edited by ³dee at 12:02:31 02/Jun/08

You forgot more animated gifs

Dithering? How many colours?

noone says "on the web" anymore

But its fifties music - the web is super duper technology back then.

That's pretty cool. Ignore Obes, he's contrary cause he's Obes. I agree with the song name clicking and the hand for the scroll bar thingy...

"click anywhere to return" can sod off and die in a fire while "previous picture | menu | next picture" buttons can come on down.

agreed. I should put the caption on the photo viewer too.

last edited by ³dee at 18:20:41 02/Jun/08

Alternatively, I could have both HTML and flash versions and it defaults to flash if its installed otherwise asks if you wish to install flash or just go HTML.

you could keep the same functionality from a non-flash site, just without the fancy scrollbars, keep the player and menu as seperate flash objects and have a noflash version of the menu just incase.

But yeah, looks great, nice layout, the cartoon style works good.

last edited by scuzzy at 18:28:32 02/Jun/08

like this but obviously better buttons/font. Somehow "click anywhere to return" seems more well placed in a popup window that you can click anywhere to close rather than in the main page itself. Perhaps you could do both? Flash pops up with click to close and html version has the buttons?
http://i296.photobucket.com/albums/mm190/pointyfork/qgl/etc.jpg

Yeah I was trying to mask all the underlying controls by having a huge invisible button.

I'd like to keep the site popup free if I can but I'll definitely add the buttons and make the photoviewer work a little more seemlessly.

With the HTML version (if I decide to do one), I could make it mostly like the original but without any flash to keep it non-flash-people friendly. The idea would be to have the flash version the preferred as its much nicer and richer than the static HTML version.

The border/webpage background definitely needs to be better integrated into the flash portion. I could have a black strip on either side so the black background in the swf just continues onto either side of the browser like a letterbox widescreen film and have some sort of top and bottom stylish borders.

well, ive done a lot of things to it, most noticably the html page its embedded in.

Ive added the text portion to the music sample buttons; made the scrollbar entirely clickable and added a little 'scroll' hint that fades in when ur over the scrollbar. The photoviewer is much better now and has next/prev/return buttons. I've added functionality to separate groups of photos however theres only one group so far, and a few other little tweaks here and there.

Let me know what you guys think.

http://users.tpg.com.au/thre3dee/bluecats/

If it doesnt update you may need to clear your browsers cache coz Ive had it do that a few times.

its that good is it?

The only thing I'm worried about at the moment is its fairly wide for low-res screens like 1024x768 and lower (only just fits). Do you think it should try to fit into smaller browsers or should they just use their damn scrollbars?

Coooooool

Trog/Jim/others, are you sure these new accounts lately aren't just someone from the same ip or the same person being a f***wit?

This is just getting stupid.

Theres a lot of it going on lately. There should be a hard coded ban or admin notification of revivals..

its all happened since the merge with ausgamers. There obvioulsy need to be a better/more strict proccess for new user accounts. Something like you cant post for a week or something.

It's a nice design, but for some reason it is built in flash? I don't know if that was an accident or what, but the flash certainly doesn't do anything that you couldn't have done without it, and makes the site difficult to use and read, and will give you horrible SEO.

Actually I lie, you have excellent SEO for the phrase "Macromedia Flash Player".

SEO?

that's what I thought

SEO, among other things, involves how much effort you put into laying out your HTML structures so that search engines can understand your content. You have bugger all HTML so search engines can't 'see' your website. So you basically can't google anything on your site except the site title, and the message in the footer (with the flash link and your name).

In a few years google might be able to see flash, but not yet.

So for anything you build in flash you have to provide an alternative. Or find a way to not have the content in the flash.

last edited by thermite at 17:59:22 10/Sep/08

serach engine optimisation

He's trolling you thermite, this is an old old thread.

hmm so it is, either way... gotta get some SEO on that site... there might be a way for you to keep the flash and feed everything through XML and somehow feed that to google in a sitemap. That just occurred to me, but I've never done it, so it might not work.

last edited by thermite at 18:47:10 10/Sep/08

Use swfobject and put some basic html as the content to be replaced... easy.

I don't think his band's site is gonna be coming up for any lucrative keywords even if it is well optimised so who cares about SEO.

While I'd generally agree with the SEO comments, two points which may be worth considering:

1) Are you targeting people searching on the net? Or more for existing listeners to the band / people searching for the specific band?

2) Flash indexing is getting better (still not great, but getting better) - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

why wont flash f***ing die already the piece of s*** f***ing dopy arse thing, bring on silverlight, all hail microsoft, or new flash like overlords

1) Are you targeting people searching on the net? Or more for existing listeners to the band / people searching for the specific band?

Most of our business is word of mouth/business card type referrals. I doubt people would google us but you never know.

Needless to say that the site I'm designing for my other band has no flash and is just pure html/php/sql/javascript.

The only thing I dislike about the site is that greeny/brown. Bleh. Other than that, it's pretty nice and I dig the music.

Flash is f***ing awesome, stop knocking it.

Woot my other band's site on Google is 1) myspace 2) our .com 3) our youtube channell and 7th) our facebook.

Sic

I so wanted to post "it sucks", but its kinda cool, I liked it.

keato is known to suck teh mancock, so if you bat for the home team, take what he said as a complitment

Nice website.