New Site

[Mr_Flash]

Just in the process of creating a new site for my cricket club and was wondering what people think.

My main concern is how it works speed wise due to the flash content.

There's not much information on there yet and it's only at design stage.

Cheers

http://www.nortonthorpecc.co.uk/

[BBK]

Speed wise no issues at all, very nice piece of work there. Only minor criticism would be that once the flash appears there was a lot of movement / screen building before any actual content appeared, but I wouldn't let that worry you!

[Mr_Flash]

yeah not much i can do with the main page loading wise. All the flash is from a template so i can't change that.

Thanks for the input.

I think it's a bit of a improvement on the original

www.nortonthorpecc.co.uk

[marcode]

looks pretty enough..

shame it takes like 20 seconds before all the flash crap is loaded, then it used nearly 100%cpu for almost FA.

[Mr_Flash]

looks pretty enough..

shame it takes like 20 seconds before all the flash crap is loaded, then it used nearly 100%cpu for almost FA.

Strange

It only take 5 seconds to load on my pc and cpu never gets to 20% cpu.

Anyone else got any comments

[marcode]

my pc's already idling at 20% cos of all the stuff running atm lol.. but the fact that you say your pc uses 20% cpu on this site alone, just to open a cricket site.. its a bit excessive? no?

[Freddy]

Firstly you need praising for the nice design. Makes a pleasant change from the usual dog shit posted.

Now to pull it apart

Rollovers don't work in FF. I had to open IE just for you.

Intro - it's bullshit. It's passable for the 1st time viewer. But you are putting off any returners. Don't get me wrong it looks nice. But it isn't surf friendly.

100% flash - don't know what the current statistic is for % of end users that have flash installed. But I know it ain't 100%. No where near it. So you have just fucked off a good number of people.

I expect to go to Cokeacola and see a 100% flash site. They don't sell indivual cans of coke and therefore aren't selling to me. It's just a 'media experience'.

I expect to go to ebay and not see any flash. I want usable content with no time delays or fannying around.

A good place for those in between is a html site with a small section for flash to be INCLUDED. I can get on and read the important stuff while the fancy pants flash can load before it dances for my entertainment.

This is advice for future projects. Don't expect you to redo this one 'cus you ain't gonna Usability and functionality over design everytime. Combine those and the skys the limit.

Right I can't put off taking the mrs shopping any longer...

[Mr_Flash]

cheers for the input. I'm thinking of scrapping that intro though. It was from a template so i don't want the praise for it either.

[Mr_Flash]

right the silly intro has now gone. I'm also going to change the flash buttons to rollover button so they should load quicker.

Is that any better

[chubblies]

Buttons still do not work in firefox

[grint]

Keep getting a 404 not found.

[Mr_Flash]

made some changes to the site after all your comments. The silly intro has gone and i have replaced the flash navigation with standard rollover images.

Still kept some of the flash but i think the whole site now runs and looks better.

Anymore comments greatly appreciated.

[fin23]

Looks nice, you may have problems with SEO being a flash page..

And links do not work in FF still.

[AspectUK]

Site looks quite nice .. but on opening I immediately thought .. what the hell has this design got to do with cricket, it doesn't relate to cricket at all, more to a corporate business website with the blue colour.

I think if you removed the top left animation and replaced it with something more crickety like, it may help detract me from thinking, "this is just a corporate business template edited for a cricket site".

You aren't doing your visitors any favours presenting your text like that, on almost every page the text is difficult to read, black text on a dark background isn't good. I personally would change the background to white, instantly making the text readable and making it much easier when you come to add any images in future, like sponsor logo's or whatever, they are all generally created for white backgrounds (for print). Use the Flash Player logo on the home page as an example of how images look wrong on dark backgrounds (unless you plan to take all images into photoshop and remove the white background and save as gif or png).

If you click on a few of the links in the left menu, the left menu vanishes on the next page, or changes to other links, would consider keeping the links, but indenting new links below the existing link (that sounds like crap, but don't know how else to put it into words).

Your tables look pants, I hate table borders. If you are good at using CSS, I would consider making a table graphic and putting the text on top of it, example: http://www.orange.co.uk/ (i'm sure there are better examples, but I aint got time to search at the minute) If you look at the row of three tables under Orange Wednesdays you'll see what I mean. The tables look completely seperate, whereas you've tried to make the tables different colours to acheive this, but because they are next to each other they look like one table with 2 different colours of text.

If this is your early webdesign career then fantastic, keep it up, you'll get there.

[Rexmonster]

I agree that the text would be easier to read on a white (or light) background, black on blue is not easy.

The 'averages' page is considerably wider than the rest of the site; even at the resolution you recommend it is too wide for the screen. I'd consider altering this to match the rest of the site and avoid the need for horizontal scrolling.

[Mr_Flash]

Thanks for all your comments i have made some more changes. Mainly using a white background.

Not sure why the navigation buttons arn't working in firefox or opera. I will look into that also

[Rexmonster]

It's definitely easier to read with the white background.

The site seems to load quite slowly for me. I notice that your menu button images are over 50kb each and that you are using png instead of jpeg/gif format. I'd convert these buttons to jpegs which would reduce their size to about 4kb each.

Also, the home page seems a bit redundant, in that there is no actual content other than the flash graphic. I'd consider adding some kind of brief introduction.

Hope this helps. R.

[Rexmonster]

With regard to the menu problems you are having in FF on the home page, I think it's because the div holding your flash graphic is expanding across the page, and so is sitting on top of the navigation menu, thereby making it impossible to click the menu buttons.