New website opinions please :)

This site is way cool! I’m going to go hang out there a while. Excellent!
FF 1.5.0.7 on WinXPsp2

yay thanks so much!

Very VERY nice.

I’ll run it through all I have available to test for you:

On PC, windows XP, SP2:
IE7 Beta 3 – Nice, but when you hover over the large flash thing with the rotating images, the top of the gray box exands about 15-20 pixels upwards. Don’t know why!

IE6 – lovely

IE5.5 – lovely – but the menu bar is centered instead of to the right.

IE 5.01 – the navigational menu (in the black box) below your header is not there at all (the “click to navigate” thing isn’t there, either – only the header is visible)

Opera 7, 8 & 9: Lovely.

Mozilla 1.7.13 – same – except when you hover over the “Navigate, Click” link, a 1 pixel dark blue line shows up all the way across the screen.

Netscape 7.1 & Netscape 8 – same as Mozilla 1.7.13.

On Mac, OSX:

Safari 2.0 – Beautimous.
Mozilla 1.0 – Beautimous.
IE 5.2 (if you care – not many do!) – kinda messed up. The black box of navigation under the header is showing, but no cool dropping “naviagtion” thing shows. The header is off to the left, while the black box is centered. Music does not play. I started it, but it’s been well over a minute and still no sound. (Again, not many people care about IE 5.2 on Mac…it depends on your audience if you do!) but you can still see the pics!

My only suggestions would be to make that center Flash thing a little smaller. The only thing you have at the bottom are more navigational links – so I’d try to get everything on the page without having to scroll. I’m at 1280×1024 screen resolution, and I still have to scroll to even see the links to swap out the pics at the bottom of the flash file – so the page is designed too large. I’d shrink that sucker down a bit to get everything up there in the viewable area.

Plus, I might put something there, if I were you, to prevent people from stealing your images. (Yes, it can be done – even from a Flash file. If you’d like me to prove it, I can.)

Hope that helps you out!

doodlebee! I wish I had access to your resources ??

faustina, nice site. I might be sending some work to that site with photo editing ??

One thing to improve: navigation once you’re off the main page. You need links to your other areas of the site. The javascript driven expandable box is not sufficient. First, it’s hard to see/read (1280×1024). The small grey text on the light grey background makes it easy to miss. Plus, if you have javascript turned off (which I do most of the time), it simply doesn’t work at all. As an alternative to removing that cool feature completely, you might want to consider simple text links in a ul at the bottom of your page.

My 2 cents.

Wow. That’s probably the only site I’ve ever seen where Platthand makes a statement…. You have SOME TALENT, lady! I didn’t even mind the flash, which is saying a LOT for me.

Thanks so much for the input everyone!

Doodlebee – I am interested in something like that as long as it just removes the “save file, print file” options instead of one of those pop-ups that say don’t steal or whatever. If you can help me out I would really appreciate it.

Faustina –

There’s not really a way to do that. Removing the “save file, print file” options requires you to actually put some code on your side that would basically invade the end user’s computer (using ActiveX controls). Not good. And pointless, if the end user has had them turned off in their security settings.

I was just saying you should do something to the images *themselves* to prevent them from being taken. It’s a rule of thumb for web designers: if you don’t want it stolen, don’t put it on the internet. There’s *always* a way to take it.

Some interesting methods I’ve seen are to only put up *part* of an image (instead of the whole thing). Also, to make the images themselves relatively small for viewing on the screen kind of eliminates people who want to print them out without paying for them – if it’s too small, it’ll look horrible if it’s enlarged. You’ll be kind of reduced to people who take them for websites (or people who use them on brochures…)

It’s just tricky to put images up for sale, actually *anything* for sale, on the internet and not get people who try to steal it. Your mission is to try as ahrd as you can to keep it from happening. Flash *is* a goo didea – no right clicking there – but the images can still be taken in a split second by anyone who knows how (I won’t say on the forum how – I’m not gonna help anyone do it!). So I was just suggesting you try some other means of protecting yourself. (Watermarks are pretty good…a nice deterrent for most.)

And Vavroom – all of the ones tested on PC are actually on *one* PC – I’ve got them all running side-by-side. So easy to check things when you’ve got such a setup – and it was all free. Took some investigating to get it working, but once you do, you can’t go back! (The Mac was a wedding gift – I got lucky ;))

doodlebee, The question is, how did you setup all these different browsers version on one machine? Multiple OS? Partitions? Woot? I’ve been looking at how to get it done, and there appears to be a few leads, but none of them seem very trustworthy, involving messing up with registry and other joys… Hmmm

vavroom –

yes, I messed with the registry. *MINOR* messing, though. There’s only *one* change you have to make, and if it gets messed up, all you have to do is change a single letter and it’s back as good as new. There’s an awesome tutorial here – works like a charm. Been using it for almost 2 years now, and it hasn’t failed yet. I just got IE7 Beta 3 on and changed IE 6 over to a standalone browser using evolt’s download and the same tutorial. It’s great.

As for the different versions of Opera, Firefox and Netscape – you just install them in different directories and they’ll run just fine side-by-side. ??