Critique, please.

[electro07]

First, would just like to state that I am a student, and this is the first Site I have designed by scratch.

It is by no means professional, however I would like it to be as professional as possible.

Still in development stages. Please let me know what you think:

http://www.paultheflyguy.com

REVIEWS, CONTACT, MEDIA pages are online, others linked from menu are not.

Best viewed with Internet Explorer, full view. Problem with Netscape view.

Thanks!

[YvetteKuhns]

The animation at the top is appropriate, yet distracting while trying to read. Scrolling until the animation is out of view solves that problem. Placing the navigation menu within the stage scaffolding is a nice design idea. The background image makes me think of the floor in an auto garage. A solid color would be less competitive with the rest of the site contents.

There are broken links which probably means you haven't created or uploaded those pages yet. Since the site is not yet completed, there isn't much text contents. The forum is currently in the "default skin" which does not match the web site color scheme.

This site does have an interesting topic, unique images and text and a unique design which will make it memorable to those who visit it. Customizing the TITLE and adding META tags for the description and keywords would help search engines list this site for more visibility. Of course, exchanging links to other theatre, entertainment and performance web sites would also help.

Best of luck!

[magagnon]

My advice: don't use marquee tags. It might look OK in IE but it's not gonna look good in anything else. I'm using Mozilla Firefox and the marquee is stuck in an infinite loop which is quite annoying.

[electro07]

I see. Opened in Netscape, same problem.

What can I use instead of the marquee tags?

[magagnon]

I see. Opened in Netscape, same problem.
What can I use instead of the marquee tags?

You can create the same effect with an animated gif.

There is a nice tutorial here (http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp?p=31536&seqNum=1).

[electro07]

I have changed the Site around a bunch, may I have a re-critique, please. :D

http://www.paultheflyguy.com/index.html

Also, I'm having trouble with the flying Peter Pan you see at the top. Now using marquee tag, but it should be a gif or flash (can't do flash).

Tried to make it a .gif, and have her change directions when she flies, but it wouldn't work. It sped up and would freeze the page. I have PSP.

http://www.paultheflyguy.com/images/CathyFlies.gif

[YvetteKuhns]

You have an empty stage image for a background image and a transparent gif of the flying Peter Pan and no background. You used the marquee tag to animate the transparent gif. You can try to control the speed, but this tag does not work the same in all browsers.

You can animate the image using Javascript or another scripting language to change the x coordinates. See this example:

http://simplythebest.net/scripts/DHTML_scripts/dhtml_script_2.html