My personal site

New sayings:
A painter must paint.
A composer must compose.
A web designer MUST NEVER EVER make someone (with a cable connection) wait so long for so little.

It is great to be able to do flash but I have seen a whole lot better that loaded a whole lot faster that impressed a whole lot more.

My suggestion is back to the drawing board.

Plain grey page with an "enter" text link in the top left corner. What's up with that? Then I "enter" and it says loading but there's no option to skip the intro. I'm on a dialup and won't stick around for a 1.3M file. At least I knew the size, but to not give an option to skip it is rather rude to your visitors, IMO.

In one of the other threads on your site (you have *three* on the front page now) I note that mairving had already suggested a "skip intro" link. Did you read that one? About how the novelty would wear off for a repeat visitor?

Whoa, ouch.

Okay - I tried my best to make it smaller.

It is now half the size at 459 kb, and has a skip intro button.

http://www.101h.com/tyler/

1. If you're going to pop-up a new window, tell me first
2. The text coming up on the intro here is really boring.
3. For your skip intro button, make the hit state a rectangle so it's easier to hit.
4. Logo font- boring! Hard to even notice it down there.
5. Those little squares there remind me of detox's avatar.
6. That big one shouldn't fade out like that - useless
7. Those URL's on there should be links
8. Make some kind of mouseover action for the
9. Background image - looks good, but that's where your speed problem is
10. Buttons - are these supposed to work?

That's it - it really doesn't look that bad, there's just a lot of logistical issues with it.

Quote: Originally posted by m0dulus
Whoa, ouch.

Sorry about the 40 lashes but you needed them. Ok now it is time to rub some salt into the wounds. It is not much better.

I would design a non-flash site with maybe some flash splash screens mixed in or on a separate page highlighting your work. You are making a cardinal mistake of trying to make your skills standout instead of focusing on the site from a users perspective. When the picture finally does load, it is really not much to look at and none of the links now are clickable. Then you have a piece of text that says thanks for visiting but I am still on your site. If your pop-up window is closed (which people will) then you are left with a website that says either Enter or Thanks for Visiting.

You obviously have the skills. You just need to use your skills to compliment the site not detriment it. I still think that the main problem is one of focus. Your focus on everything that you design should be on the visitor to your site. Right now your focus is too much on "Wow, people will think that I am really a great webmaster because I can do so much". Unfortunately I have seen quite a few sites fail because of this problem.

okay, I'll start from scratch

Another way to incorporate flash into your sites is to just use small pieces of it. There's no reason why you can't make a flash movie that's, say 200 x 350 instead of a full size. http://www.phong.com does a good job of this (or it did - site seems to be down right no...). Bryan Farkas's infostardesign.com (I think that's it) does something like this too.