Flash Photo gallery/portfolio

Looking for a bit of feedback on a website I'm in the process of putting the finishing touches on. Its a photo gallery/portfolio that I built for my wife. My wife is the one who took all the pictures on the site, with the exception of the two thumbnails for the category links. I still need to get some of her pics for that, those are just thumbnails of some scenery off the net somewhere. They will be replaced before the site goes live, and the full compliment of pictures (200+) will be in the gallery as well.

For now there are only 9 pictures, however the first section has some repeated so I could test out how it will function with multiple pages.

A few notes about the site:

• News content is FPO (for placement only).
• Preloaders are not fully in yet. There is an FPO preloader on the main part of the site when it loads up, but when navigating between sections there are no loaders. This shouldnt cause much of a problem, as the site is pretty optimized, so each swf is between 20-60kb. Loaders are present when you click on a thumbnail, however there is a glitch with it that I need to fix. The glitch occurs when you click on any thumbnail after the first, the progress bar is at 100% then jumps back to 0%.
• Scale it around, the elements should repositions themselves on the screen based on the size of your browser. This has been coded to work between 700 and 1200 pixels wide, any wider or smaller and it looks weird, so I put limits on it.
• I still have to add the code to embed the swf object correctly. For now, if youre using IE, you'll get the click-box on it.
• I need to tweak the closing of the images. I delayed it until the end of the animation when the images open for functionality reasons, but it seems the delay is too long.

Well, I think thats it for now, feel free to speak your mind about it.

Link: http://sanctifiedstu...jean/shell.html

Edited by Pax, 15 April 2007 - 08:38 AM.

it looks like Simpleviewer.

anyway how old are you....
hearing that u got a wife , i feel like getting old faster lol

Edited by genozider, 15 April 2007 - 07:13 PM.

Hmm...never heard of Simpleviewer, I'll give it a google.

And, Im 20 years old, got married when I was 19.

That is a really nice effect you have made when viewing the gallery. How did you do that, I presume you used Flash.
I have also noticed what I think is a glitch, as you slect an image it begins to load as it should, but if you move your mouse cursor to another image the image that's loading disappears. Is this normal?

Good work 9/10.

Keep i tup

Edited by Propax, 16 April 2007 - 03:13 AM.

when you click one of the links at the top, you should put a description in the blue bit under the nav, so say for example if you click 'gallery' and there is two choices, something in the blue bit like 'please select a catagory' something like that, just a bit of filler really.

but it looks pretty cool wish i could make stuff like that. flash made me cry in college. i just couldnt handle it.

You got it easy moopy, Flash makes me pee the bed

Edited by Propax, 16 April 2007 - 04:59 PM.

Hey, I really enjoy the site. The only small problem I seen is the logo at the top. The blue is so vibrant, it almost makes it hard to read. Or maybe it's just my eyes. Other than that, I enjoyed looking around. I absolutely love the fade-in effect when you click a picture. And your wife is an excellent photographer. My wife dabbles in photography, too. She keeps nagging me to make her a site, so I might have to break down and do it one day. But anyhow, that's some top-shelf work there. Keep it up. And flash makes my brain turn to oatmeal. But it's the cinnamon kind, so I guess it's not that bad.

Edited by efd, 16 April 2007 - 07:57 PM.

You need to apply that IE fix so that you don't have to "click to activate".

Dan

That is a really nice effect you have made when viewing the gallery. How did you do that, I presume you used Flash.
I have also noticed what I think is a glitch, as you slect an image it begins to load as it should, but if you move your mouse cursor to another image the image that's loading disappears. Is this normal?

Thanks for the comments, yes I used flash for it, obviously much of the "idea" was taken from the lightbox sort of stuff. I tried to put my own twists to it so it doesnt look *exactly* like lightbox, but still functions similarly. In my opinion, it is one of the better ways to show images in a gallery (popups suck )

The moving loader is something I will need to fix as well, thanks.

when you click one of the links at the top, you should put a description in the blue bit under the nav, so say for example if you click 'gallery' and there is two choices, something in the blue bit like 'please select a catagory' something like that, just a bit of filler really.

but it looks pretty cool wish i could make stuff like that. flash made me cry in college. i just couldnt handle it.

Ill give that a go and see what it looks like, thanks. As far as Flash goes...it just takes a lot of patience to learn. Its a bit of a fiddly program to begin with, so trying to learn it is not the easiest of things. Hopefully Adobe fixes that in CS3.

Hey, I really enjoy the site. The only small problem I seen is the logo at the top. The blue is so vibrant, it almost makes it hard to read. Or maybe it's just my eyes. Other than that, I enjoyed looking around. I absolutely love the fade-in effect when you click a picture. And your wife is an excellent photographer. My wife dabbles in photography, too. She keeps nagging me to make her a site, so I might have to break down and do it one day. But anyhow, that's some top-shelf work there. Keep it up. And flash makes my brain turn to oatmeal. But it's the cinnamon kind, so I guess it's not that bad.

I used that blue on the logo, because it is the blue used throughout the rest of the site. I'll play around with it tho and see what I can do. I'm thinking of making the little camera next to the text in the logo gray rather than blue.

You need to apply that IE fix so that you don't have to "click to activate".

Dan

Yah, thats in the next version. I'm just using the default html page supplied with Flash (bad, I know). Final version of this will have a normal HTML + CSS page that gets replaced with the flash when you visit it. Hoping that and a few tweaks inside my swfs for the website will result in some half decent search engine results. Biggest thing I'm going for is the image search engine results. With all the different images, I'm sure I can start to pull some good hits in with properly coded and named images.

To All:

Thanks for the great comments, I'm pretty stoked about the site...its the first one Ive really had the chance to build since I finished college and started working full time...and its also my first website that hasn't totally sucked in the design category

Looking very nice, mate

You got it easy moopy, Flash makes me pee the bed

hehe, i keep meaning to give it a go, and yeah Pax, when the new cs3 suite comes out im hoping it might be a bit easier to manage. right now im just amazed with the new adobe bridge

edit: just to clarify, i meant give flash ago. not peeing the bed..

Edited by moopy, 21 April 2007 - 07:36 AM.

Really nice site there, so these comments are really just nagging things rather than anything serious. As mentioned before, when you click on an image to view and move the cursor away you lose the loading image. Also, I'm not entirely convinced by that bar between the menus and the content but I'm not really sure what you could put there instead. Finally, the camera logo in the top left doesnt stand out very much, which is good in a way as the bright blue of the main text really grabs the eye but perhaps make the camera a bit sharper and grey to mirror the "photography" to the right of the main logo, the blue looks a little blurred.

Overall though, an ace site!