Critique please for this gallery

[Big Jay]

Hi,
Thought I would introduce myself then show the site for critique. I've been developing websites for the internet since netscape first appeared. You can probably tell this with old school habits I am still trying to break. Over the past month I've been cramming css, actionscript, javascript, php into my head as fast as it can absorb it. Despite this I think I am failing to coordinate all this info into good webdesign practices.

Would you please take a look at this site and let me know what I am doing right and wrong.

Here is the site. It is a flash art gallery.

http://www.yucelerdogan.com

thanks for your help,

Jay

[Snitchcat]

First impressions:

It's calm and comfortable to watch. Perhaps a little too simple for me -- then again, that maybe why it appealed so.

Questions:

Apart from showcasing Yucel, is the site meant to do anything else?
Having text at the top immediately says 'navigation' to me, so I tried clicking 'Yucel' and found out it was not clickable -- will be non-clickable or will it lead to company information at some point?
Contact worked fine for me.
Any particular reason there must be a preloader before the actual gallery?
Should the preloader take so long to go anywhere? I almost shut the browser before it finished.
Why does the gallery open in a popunder? I found this annoying.
While I found the gallery itself to be interesting, the fade in/out seemed jerky to me?

Apart from that, it seems to be a good start.

Hope this helps some.

Take care,
Snitch.

[Big Jay]

Thanks for the crits

yucel is a advertising art director so he wanted it to look and feel exactly the way it does, very minimal and very calm. I can almost hear the enya playing in my mind watching this slideshow.

The site only showcases his art. nothing else (besides the contact mailto link)

about the YUCEL at top. does this need something to let people who wander in know what this is? As said earlier he is an art director, who is getting into photography so maybe he might need something to let people know who he is and what he does.

preloader, you mean the two dots above the C or the line showing download progress?

I added the progress bar because the slide show is almost a meg. The 3 second dot thing was something he thought would be cool, but I am not sure it does anything for the site.

The popover was to make the screen as big as possible so people can see the site. Are there better ways to do this. Since SP2 some people get the yellow bar stopping it from opening.

I'll have to look into the jerkiness issue. what kind of machine did you view it on? I think the gallery is set to 10-12 frames a second, which may be causing the issue.

He's a friend of mine so I wanted to try updating it.

thanks again

[Snitchcat]

Re: Yucel / Links / About
I do think you need to have something that provides a little background on Yucel.

Having a gallery to showcase his work is great, but if I wanted to find out more about the guy, I'd automatically look for something that would be along the lines of 'about me'. Perhaps 'Yucel' could be linked to such a (static) page? Personally, I'd feel odd about contacting the guy without some background information.

IMO, this is particularly important, besides the gallery.

Re: Preloader
I mean the whole thing. The preloader, for me, just takes too long to come up and, as a personal preference, I don't like opening a second window when one is suitable.

I'm not sure either that the preloader / dots does anything for site. It's a cool concept, but again, personally, I'm very much pro-delete anything that doesn't add to the purpose of the site, etc. (Must be my author background showing. :p)

Re: Popunder
With the popunder, I'm really not sure what you can do. Would it be better to let people open the site in whatever browser size they have currently. Then it would be up to them to enlarge the browser if they wanted to get the full effect of the gallery.

Seriously, I'm stabbing in the dark here -- someone else may be more knowledgeable about this?

Re: Jerkiness
Jerkiness as in I thought the fade in/out of the photos was too pixelly -- not smooth enough. It's possible the number of frames is causing this. Then again, if you increase the number of frames, the entire file may be too big for anyone with a slower connection to handle effectively?

It's really just my style to prefer smaller files and smoother fade in/out.


Other than that, viewing it again, I like.

Take care,
Snitch.

[Big Jay]

thanks for the feedback, I'll do the updates the next time he has me update the gallery.

[WoD]

I am but a single user, but if it is worth anything to you; sites that pop up/under new windows to show content that would have been perfectly at home in my nice tidy Firefox tab pollute my screen and, for lack of a milder phrase, piss me right off.

Flash can stretch and scale, why not let it? If someone wants to scale those images down to the size of a postage stamp then let them.

And the site does, rather quickly, spam me with images that are almost unsuitable for work with no warning whatsoever. I know it is "art", but a semi nakd woman in any capacity is going to turn some heads.

[Big Jay]

letting it scale is a good point.

I forgot that he has a few women in tubs and bikinis, yes they may not be work safe for anyone else who looks at the site. Sorry I work at an advertising agancy so I look at this stuff all day long and it all kinds of blends together after a while.

Thanks for the crits

[Big Jay]

Just been through the site and completely revised the layout. The entire site is now one movie. The name and frame fade in act as a preloader in that while you watch it some content has time to load, the rest will load as you watch.

[Sanim]

I forgot that he has a few women in tubs and bikinis

Er, it shows something on a lady that you don't usually see. Sick.. :eek:

[rDubya]

while not paricularly liking the entrance of the site, from an artistic point of view it works. the only thing i see wrong with the site is the lack of information, doesn't say who anyone is, where they are, what they do, or if it's anything other than entertainment.