Dynamic Flash Website in Evo

Hi,

We have just launched a hybrid website, partly flash and partly html, which we have built using Modx Evo. The whole website is fully dyanmic, including the Flash in which case XML is based on Modx Ditto Snippet etc etc. Anyway, enough with the chatter.

The showcase website is for Romain Negre, a professional phtographer based in France.

Take a look at: http://www.romain-negre.com and tell me what you think

Thanks!

Both positive and negative feedback appreciated

Very nice, if one likes that sort of thing. Smooth, slick, and very professional. It gave a much more solid feeling than such sites usually have.

Personally, whenever a website I’m visiting starts bouncing and jiggling and making noise at me I close it down as soon as I can. But that’s just my personal reaction to that sort of thing. I’ve had to build hyperactive sites for clients, although I don’t do Flash and so stick to JQuery animations.

I think it’s a nice site... a rich, emotive experience that shows off the photographer’s style very nicely.

A little constructive feedback: In my opinion the screen transitions / hover effects are a little on the slow side. That’s a personal preference, but there’s a lot of evidence that people are impatient and have a short attention span when browsing the web. You could perhaps retain ’soft’ transitions to retain the mood you have set, whilst speeding up your animations.

Also - and don’t take this the wrong way - but with the iPad and mobile browsers not supporting Flash and difficulties in getting content indexed by search engines, why the choice of Flash over jQuery or some other Javascript library? Or even CSS3 to achieve the animations?

I’ve got a major beef with sites that jump around from Flash to HTML and back again. Why not stick to one format only?

Since several years there are ways to use the browser’s default back and forward button (and use separate URLs for each page). You are seemingly aware of the most popular solution out there, and hence referencing the SWFAddress JS library. But it’s not working. I don’t see #page-abc pseudo deep-links appearing anywhere on Flash-only screens.

If I go from a Flash page to a non-Flash page and hit the browser’s back button, the music loads again, although I have clicked the "mute" button. Plus, the "loading" animation is appearing again each time.

All things considered, I’d say this is far from a truly professional approach. People are used to certain interface / usability standards these days, and your site doesn’t set a good example in that regard.