Landscape Company (Website)
designisgood (29 points) | Tue, 2007-08-14 00:52
Dynamic content website with mixed Flash, PHP5 and well written content. View the full site at http://www.claudedaccord.com to get the full effect but we mixed some of their best work with some of ours and this was the result they were looking for. So what do you think?
And yes, the Flash is a bit heavier on the front-end than we wanted, but what the client wants, sometimes they get after they bitch about it enough. :P
icona.ca | vp & art director | mac snob & fun guy
the blog: http://www.activeimagestudios.com/blog/
Nice work.
SEO wise, I hate Flash sites. Look at the extent of pages Google picked up:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.claudedaccord.com
2 pages in total only. It is virtually impossible to optimize this site for any keywords.
We'll be throwing in a Google Maps page anyhow, even though the client won't know it and there's really no mndate for SEO since he's catering to a small regional market that will be sent print collateral pieces that will then drive them to the site for more info.
You can also just deploy an AdWords or any other PPC campaign if they really wanted to drive some targetted traffic and as well as know, it's way faster and better money spent to do it that way rather than wait for your organic ranking to kick in over months and months.
icona.ca | vp & art director | mac snob & fun guy
the blog: http://www.activeimagestudios.com/blog/
I'd use an 80% fill on the background if I were you.
And the flash!
I didn't even give it time to load.
I lost interest after the first 30 seconds of load time.
I don't do flash.
Learn AJAX.
I love AJAX, but unfortunately there's some things it won't do. So, I took another look at the file and managed to reduce it by quite a bit so it should be loading very fast now. Appreciate the feedback.
icona.ca | vp & art director | mac snob & fun guy
the blog: http://www.activeimagestudios.com/blog/
with HTML, AJAX and good coding?
Here is another bad news! if you disable javascript, your site doesnt work! Fix that and provide alternative! mainly for accessibility issues...:)
If you disable javascript (and come one, how many average users even have a clue of how to do this) how many sites will actually work for you these days. Don't forget that with the new way you have to code Flash into your site (can't use those EMBED tags anymore since IE7) you have to rely on an external .js file.
icona.ca | vp & art director | mac snob & fun guy
the blog: http://www.activeimagestudios.com/blog/
"(and come one, how many average users even have a clue of how to do this)"
I have worked with many clients that specifically request that site works without javscripts. the extranl js will help show off your flash version, while the HTML stuff tell the user what the is site all about! and you can take that opportunity and tell the user that they require js to view you site.
It's a good practice that would help you long way....
I've had clients request that as well. Also, I'm not sure when this occurs, but Internet Explorer sometimes has Javascript disabled on default. I hardly ever use IE, but it's something that I've ran into before.
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Perfectly Lost Designs
Your client needs an education about design! The Flash is horrible. I hope you can persuade them to drop it. Think of these two points:
1. What Ivan said about the impact on search engines. Bad for business!
2. People looking for landscape designers are seeking beauty, harmony, and peacefulness in their environment. They are not likely to react well to all that cheesy Flash junk. Basic marketing.
By the way, the large white lettering is painful to look at, and hard to read over many of the backgrounds where there's not enough contrast.
Mara
The client doesn't care about SEO as they are all ready overwhelmed with business but just need a site to drive clients to who are calling or that they can refer to from a business card or brochure. They are obviously focusing on a small regional area for business so it's not like they're selling widgets to the masses here. And they will come up regardless since they have a YellowPages.ca deal that will get them more traffic than they're expecting anyhow.
The client simply wanted to showcase images of their work by using large images. If you've actually looked at the site you'll see how simple it is. Each page it clean, has some short punchy copy and on all of the interior pages there is no flashy elements zipping across. And, after having shown it to a focus group of 30 of their past clients and others, the client said everyone loved it and thought it looked great. This was 1 of 3 designs pitched (although not my fav) and this was their choice.
icona.ca | vp & art director | mac snob & fun guy
the blog: http://www.activeimagestudios.com/blog/
So this really isn't a critique.
I *have* actually looked at the site. It made me dizzy. If I were looking for a landscape designer and decided to check out that site (based on one or more of the lead-ins you mentioned), I might very well decide against going further with them due to all that nauseating pulsing Flash stuff. Really. It's a turn-off. My opinion only, of course, but I'm both an experienced designer, been at it probably longer than you've been alive, and I'm also a consumer of landscaping services for both my farm and my in-town studio. I would conclude from this site that they would not be a good match for me.
I also noticed that many of the photos seem to be duplicates, which suggests a paucity of material to illustrate their capabilities. You might want to ask them to pop for more photos.
Mara
I hate it when people post their work and then defend each part that we remind them isn't perfect. /sigh
If you don't want us to point out the bad things, this isn't the place to post.
With that being said, the flash is just too big. You need to optimize for web. I'm on a very fast network and connection, and usually even very large flash sites (we design in Flash, here.) load rather quickly. I found myself thinking "Huh. . ." at seeing your preloader move so slowly. I can't imagine the load time on my connection at home.
Secondly, the first link in these kind of sites that I click on is always Portfolio. I love to see a portfolio that is well executed, and I like to see people's work. It took a long time to load each thumbnail (bad idea.) and if you don't wait for the thumbnails to load (which I'm assuming Lightbox loads after), each piece opens to a new page (directly linked) and just sitting there on it's own, not even very high resolution.
Overall I think that I like your design, however; the site itself doesn't look like it needs to be a full flash site. I think it could have gotten away with flash on the home page. Looking at the amount of Flash, I would give it up for faster load time.
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Perfectly Lost Designs
So you're saying people cannot come back in and explain a bit of the throught process behind why the decisions were made as they were? Boo hiss, espcially when some of the comments (like the javascript one) make no real sense, so i thought I'd just point that out.
I DO appreciate the feedback and WILL be making some adjustments based on these comments, but at the same time when I see someone like mara06's continual comments on peoples work and yet find her site to be horrid I find it interesting.
The site is not all in Flash, simply the side nav is and the homepage is. I'm sure we can just up the JPEG compression a bit more and drop the size down for quicker load. But again, this is being seen by a Canadian regional audience for the most part and we have the luxury of having more people with higher speed connections so the load time should be comparable to what I'm seeing here, which has the site loading in about 5 seconds.
icona.ca | vp & art director | mac snob & fun guy
the blog: http://www.activeimagestudios.com/blog/
Please don't be so defensive, Michael. (Well, actually, I think we all are sometimes, just a little. Let's just say it isn't helpful, and I'll listen to myself saying that, take my own advice, and move on)
I'd love to have your specific suggestions on how to improve my Web site. It was designed and uploaded by a colleague who, though still a good friend, is no longer available to me for site maintenance.
One thing I would love to change is that the pages don't adjust proportionally to fill whatever monitor they're viewed on.
I'd also like to upgrade the portfolio pages to include some newer work that I'm proud of.
Oh yeah, and some of the grayscale photos we used are horribly out of date.
If all I could do was tweak the existing site, and knew how to do more than just change the copyright date (the extent of my technical Web savviness), I'd do those things...er...in a flash. But I don't. So obviously, revampimg the whole site is something that'll have to wait for a new colleague.
Meanwhile, any ideas? (Not meaning to hijack your critique thread -- please feel free to start a new one on the Forum page.)
Mara
Hey Mara! First if i were to offer suggestions, i'd say recreate the whole site with layers and not tables..really it's fun and web friendly!, on the folio page: how about a bit of DE-cluttering, some nice font for the text would be just fine!
Those are few think that came in my mind while looking at your site! i love it tho!
email me if you need any further help! :)
Hi. I see you're new here, so you may not know that I don't actually do Web sites, although I do work with clients on developing design concepts, then farm out the technical aspects to contractors if they don't have their own people.
My site was done in 2001 by a former part-time colleague and remains basically unchanged to this day. I would not be doing the renovation work myself. I have no idea what you mean by "layers not tables." I have tables? Who knew?
:-)
Mara
Yeah! i know what you mean! you get that a lot! a graphic designer put up a design concept and the coder does the messy work!,
It's always good to ask whoever works on you site what he's doing and explain it at your level( trust me it's not difficult and it give you an insight of what is going on behind your site...)!
for instance, when you view you page and look behind (the code bits: view>view source on a mac), you will see after body tag, either or , the first let you know that it a table the later tells you that you are dealing with layers...magic isn't? :-) however you could also have it both....from the displaying side you wont tell the difference but trust me there is sooo muh difference when it comes to its accessibility and the rest.....
bless
landrik
I agree, I think that all it needs is a little bit of updating. (I feel the same way about my site, and I would hate for people to judge my current graphic design skills by looking only at my website. Especially since it's not the newest version.)
Your site was done without any CSS? I think that would be the first step - creating a stylesheet that you can apply to all the pages, even if you add new ones. That way everything will stay consistent. :) Creating a flexible portfolio would also be a good idea - where you can literally drag and drop files into a folder and it updates with new work on your website.
I would love to help out in any way I can. Feel free to email me anytime. seraphim[at]perfectlylost[dot]com.
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Perfectly Lost Designs
I don't know from CSS, so I can't answer that. My former colleague did the site for me in 2001. He spoke of Perl, he spoke of Dreamweaver, he spoke of needing to find a good full-time job to get serious about money for his daughters' educations...and then *pouf* he was gone! He's a friend, though. I can ask him what-all was involved.
Thanks for your offer. I might take you up on it.
Mara