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Please Crqtique my site - would love any and all input good or bad


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www.gibsonsrestaurantgroup.com

 

I work for a restaurant group and am the IT person. Had a design concept and asked our internal person to create a website for the group and the site above is what he created. Can you please critique the site and let us know what everyone thinks and where we could use improvement? Any and all feedback is welcome....

 

The links to our other sites are active

The websites are all made purely in flash. Bad, bad move!

 

1. They are inaccessible to any user that doesn't have flash installed. This may include users who make use of certain browsers due to a disability i.e. visually impaired, etc. You should provide an alternate HTML version that is accessible.

 

2. Search engines cannot index flash. If you are promoting a service via your website then you will struggle to get any results from keyword searches. Again you should create HTML versions that search engines can spider.

 

3. The websites do not fit in a lower screen resolution. The banner (from the left) sits directly above the main content area. This is poor.

 

IMO websites should not be made purely using flash. You are making the website inaccessible to a massive number of Internet users. Integrating small areas of flash to spice them up is fine.

Thanks Neil for the input.... The page is a filler until we create a full ecommerce site with a lot more content. For now we are trying to create the most basic of pages that show a potential diner about the locations.

 

Creatively - we are looking for something flashy enough to draw the users attention and FLASH seems to be the easiest. We plan to add more HTML later as we develop the site.

 

What are you feelings visually and where can we improve. I would love everyone to be as nit picky as possible.

T2. Search engines cannot index flash. If you are promoting a service via your website then you will struggle to get any results from keyword searches. Again you should create HTML versions that search engines can spider.

 

actually google can now index flash websites.

 

Also if you continue using flash, a load bar would be nice.

 

One last thing, I think the flash banner on the left was a cool idea, but maybe change the colors of the grey

I don't care if Google can index flash sites or not, I just don't like them. I don't like staring at loading.gif images (and I'm on a normal DSL connection). I don't like feeling seasick because the screen is moving around. I like the option to enlarge the text if I choose to do so, and I like the option to turn off images. Some use of flash is OK, but for the small amount of time it would take to make a normal HTML site, it would be time well spent.

I'm with the flash hate camp.

And google only indexes VERY, VERY, Extremely simple flash.. no doubt it's getting better as time progresses.. but it's more of a bonus to already existing flash sites as opposed to a site still being build.

 

And to be fair there's nothing being doing there that javascript can't do, it's image flashing in and out. <a href='http://medienfreunde.com/lab/innerfade/'>Which javascript does just fine</a>

I for one find this to be quite irritating and most likely wouldn't spend much time on the site, consider adding a pauze button.

Using javascript + images might even yield some hits from people doing an image search.

There's some easily fixed <a href='http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gibsonsrestaurantgroup.com%2F'> validation issues</a> btw.

 

Okay.. clicking further (Chicago link), the site opens in a new window I'm getting sound in my browser now? I thought my speakers were dieing on me with this annoying static like sound playing trough my music.

Not to mention opening something in a new window is unexpected browser behaviour as I'd like to be in control of my own browser.. instead of it deciding for me to open a new window. The w3c seems to agree as the "target" attribute is deprecated in xhtml 1.0 strict.

 

In the end, no I don't like any of this flashy experience being offered. And <a href="http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/design-factors/">there's plenty of reports</a> out there showing the majority of the visitors doesn't either. They want a fast loading site with information.

 

Not much else to comment on as using flash for nearly everything leaves little to comment on.

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