Let me know what you think of my Gold Rush website!

Hello All
I’ve just launched a website for a client of mine who wrote a book about the Mount Kare gold rush in Papua New Guinea.

* The site is standards compliant: XHTML 1.0 Strict
* Uses Flash cookies so the animation will only play once every 24 hours. This stops the animation repeating every time a visitor views a new page.
* The home page uses AJAX on the tabs

Anyway, let me know what you all think:
Mount Kare gold rush in Papua New Guinea

Personally not a fan of flash, I like the subtle use and limited repetition. Very attractive design and execution. If I had to make one criticism I would say that the main navigation is not as obvious as one might want. Possibly a little more space between and a more noticeable :hover effect.

I’d be interested to hear more about your experience building this site with MODx.

Cheers,

Jay

Very nice site. The dark background brings out the sparkle in the gold and the pictures are very powerful images. Looks like an interesting book, I will check the content out better when I have more time.

My only comment/observation is regarding the music, it would be nice to have it continue from page to page rather than restarting. I have no idea of a cool way to do that without frames. So between using frames and restarting the music I prefer to restart the music

Also on the The Kare saga - Prologue, the paragraph that ends with "This was never proven or repeated. " has a line break rather than a new paragraph. Not sure if this is intentional.

Great site! If you are going to use flash then I think this is the way to do it. I have a new site coming online in two days and I decided to use a piece of javascript to blend images (exact same sort of effect though).

Well done.

Thank for your comments.

Jay, could the main navigation not being visible enough be due to your monitor being too dark? Personally I can’t see how/why people wouldn’t notice the left nav. especially when it’s the first place the eye looks on a website when you want to go to navigate to a new page.

Just my opinion though

Quote from: Vitalized at Feb 28, 2008, 09:20 PM

Jay, could the main navigation not being visible enough be due to your monitor being too dark?

It isn’t that I don’t see it or it is dim it is that compared to the other elements on the page that have higher contrast and weighted proportion the navigation system doesn’t look enough like a navigation system as much as it looks like an unordered list.

I mean I am really digging to nitpic--the site is great, don’t get me wrong.

I would rarely recommend what I am about to but I think actually that a set of image links using the same theme as the rest of the site would be nice. CSS background image techniques work well for this.

But again, honestly I think it very good.

Keep building such nice sites--and continue your tasteful, unobtrusive use of flash elements.


Cheers,

Jay

very nice site. I like the layout. The navigation looks sweet to me, with the sparkling white for the gold on hover

guess its a matter of taste.

I like the site!

Thanks for the nice comments... Keep your opinions coming!..