I have been working the last month on a virtual market place... I tried to get some feedback from a couple of other forums but no one seems to be into animations... or at least not "other peoples" animations. So I thought I would try here to get some honest feedback.
My objective is to have a virtual market place for people who collect a particular type of doll that is no longer manufactured.. She is called Baby Face. To promote this I have made various free things for downloads through out the market such as puzzles, paperdolls, Adoption records... And in the Civic Centre which I just finished building, there will be the First Miss Baby Face Pageant!
None of the women who collect these dolls has much computer experiance so getting any feedback there is a lost cause. They either have no idea's or they want things that are so intense, they would take a digital cartoonist and a 3d programer to accomplish! I work only with Swish Max.
So, if any of you have a bit of time and would not mind wandering around the market, I would greatly apreciate any feadback.... idea's and so on...
This is not a site for older computers or dial ups! And there are area's which are not yet completed... The password for the locked room is " naughty " :-) just a gimic to get people to look actually.... The Rotunde in the Civic Centre I will have fotos which will rotate around the room... when I figure it out!! LOL but at the moment it is stationery.......
Don't mind our little thief... he is harmless... just pesky because he likes to steal things.
Ok... well... here is the URL
Thanks!:)
Ms Pamela
Forgot to welcome you to AWN MissPamela. I recognize you as a moderator at Flashkit.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
Most visitors of this forum are happy to look at and comment on animation. I suggest that you post more direct links to any animation you have on your site. (It's not immediately obvious where any is and most of us don't have time to go clicking around).
This is not necessarily the place to come for web advice, but a few quick observations:
- Your buildings are cute but there's no outward indication of what they contain. This forces a visitor to go on a rollover hunt to find what anything is. I would include some signage, or an inset graphic; some visual clue about what each building/shop is.
- Scripty font is too hard to read.
- in general I'd try to label everything. Since the kind of visitor you'll get is probably not too computer saavy, spell it out: let them know what they're clicking on, where they are going. Make sure the navigation is consistent (looks the same on every page) and they always know where they are. It's easy to get lost on the web.
- All (or most) of your pages are Flash. We love Flash here, but you've got the dreaded "click to activate" security bug* (on each and every Flash page). Might not be an option now, but it sometimes is best to develop the shell of a site with straight html and reserve using Flash for graphics/animation.
*Or here is a fix to the click to activate bug using javascript:
1. create javascript file named "runactiveshell.js"
it will contain this gobbledygook:
function runShell(){
document.write('http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" id="shell" width="800" height="600" align="middle">');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('');
document.write('http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />');
document.write('');
}
This javascript file will live next to your html file.
Replace "MyFlashMovie.swf" with your .swf's filename.
Change any other parameters to fit your situation.
2. Then in the html file (that you're embedding your Flash into):
in the head tag put:
in the body tag put:
runShell();
Good luck.
Ted Nunes - www.tedtoons.com
Wow, Thanks Ted. I had no idea about that Flash thing... I never have seen anything like that and you are the first one that mentioned it to me. But of course you are the first one that took the time to comment! For that I thank you very much.
When I created the market, I had in mind something I had enjoyed as a child... most of you will not remember these... but there was a magazine in which one page was dedicated to an advertisement for an old childrens clothing company. The entire page was FULL of all kinds of things and you had to look over the complete page to find all the surprises... And so when I built Pitty Patter Market, I put a musique box on a desk in an office.....that opens and plays, a mouse that runs off with things... puzzles and paper dolls.... just a lot of fun things that people have to look for. So this lack of any readily available map or plan was intentional. But I can see how you are right... no one has the time to just sit and click through an entire site just to give a critique. I guess I did not think about this.
Thank you again for your time. :)
Ms Pamela
Pitty Patter Market
I just remembered, when I started this site I did put in a java script with my index file.... here is what it has:
// When the page loads:
window.onload = function(){
if (document.getElementsByTagName) {
// Get all the tags of type object in the page.
var objs = document.getElementsByTagName("object");
for (i=0; i
Pitty Patter Market
Honestly, I don't know that much javascript, so I can't tell you where all you would need to put that memory leak script.
Our techy's at my company dug up this script I'm talking about (for correcting that "click to activate" business). You would need one for every page that has a Flash movie loaded in it. (well, if that Flash movie has interactivity; buttons, etc. --if it doesn't, then I wouldn't worry about it).
One day, hopefully, the browsers will fix this "feature". You could choose to live with the extra clicks until that day. It's a question of how polished you want your site to be. It's a minor thing as web-related problems go. --t
Ted Nunes - www.tedtoons.com
:-) Ok thanks!!
Pitty Patter Market
Hi MissPamela.
Kirupa has an easy to follow tutorial on the FlashObject js thing.
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash8/flash_fix.htm
Your site looks like fun for it's market. Not sure why you chose to go with so many subdirectories though. That's going to make updating a bear.
I am not all that familiar with Swish but wouldn't it have been easier to import external clips on demand into a main/gui swf, instead of individual htmls for each section.
I wouldn't worry about the about the memory leak event handler issue that much if I was you.
Cute dolls. Any chance you could add a turn off music button?
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
> wouldn't it have been easier to import external clips ...into a
> main/gui swf, instead of individual htmls for each section...
For some cases there IS a nice simplicity to a single GUI .swf file that loads external movieclips, but I'd actually say that for this kind of site, having them in seperate html files is better in terms of a visitor's ability to bookmark the section(s) that interests them. With a single .swf file, they will have to click through from the beginning each time they visit.
Ted Nunes - www.tedtoons.com
You have a point there Ted. Hadn't thought about that. In the newer versions of Flash you do have the option of adding named anchors so you can use go back buttons, but that would probably be hard to develop in Swish.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.