Please Critique my Site - Interactive Portfolio

[eFranklin]

Hi, I am new to powweb and just recently uploaded my site onto the powweb server. I would love to have some comments on my website. I am currently a Digital Art student scheduled to graduate in December 2004. I wanted to make an Interactive Portfolio in Flash displaying some of my best artwork since I have been in school. So please comment on my site design. This is the first full website that I have created in Flash. I am still learning more and more about Flash as we speak. Not only comment on my site design but you may comment on some of my artwork as well. Don't be afraid to make negative comments because I am in a creative field so I know how to handle criticism. So critique away I have already heard the opinions of my friends, family, and co-workers. Now I would like to hear the opinions of people from all over the world. Here is the link. http://www.ericfranklin.net

Thanks!
Eric

[dizzyd]

Wow. I don't really have any negative comments... I'm impressed with your flash abilities and not to mention your image skills...

[YvetteKuhns]

The blue graphic on the intro page is nice, but the edge on the right where the big skull appears shows the line like two images instead of transitioning as one image. The page is mostly black which is dark and makes it more difficult to read the text. The copyright info should appear at the bottom of the page.

Intro pages are not very practical when relying on search engines to get visitors to your site, because search engines rank pages with the most useful text first. Visitors will enter your website through a higher ranking page and never see the intro page. So the index page should be the home page and include links to your main pages.

Because the entire website is created in Flash, no pages will get high ranking on search engines. But the Flash and graphics are very attractive. I was able to turn off the sound to hear my phone. I especially like the landscape art with the sunset, rainbow, water and other Terragen art. The thumbnails are quite small. Maybe they could be bigger and possibly scroll to fit in the area.

I love photography, but I only saw landscapes in color. I personally have more of those, too. But you should consider adding more categories. The overall web design feel is very contemporary though the art has many different styles. The website is very appealing and professional, a great portfolio website.

[eFranklin]

Thanks for the comments. I have actually had a few other people tell me that my thumbnails might be too small. I agree they are quite small but the main reason for making them smaller is because I feared if I made them to large it would make the site look cluttered. So now I am sort of experiencing with the position and sizes of the thumbnails around the site. I am still learning Action Script so I really can't do anything incredibly fancy with them yet, so hopefully the more I learn about Action Script maybe I can figure out something better for the thumbnails.

[mainrl]

its there - very nice. background music very soothing - not distracting.

good blend and transition of colors - not ho hummmmmm

just a quick peek, but when i "clicked to enlarge" some of them had scroll bars - it jumped out at me that they were out of place when the rest of the site was so "to the px"

looks good

i enjoyed it

[YvetteKuhns]

You can simply have a few larger thumbnails appear in a row and have them scroll from left to right or vise versa. Or up and down.

http://www.flashkit.com/movies/Scripting/Scrolling/Image_Vi-Lee_Brim-1918/index.php

There are plenty of examples on the Internet.