Return-Path: hmoulding@excite.com
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 22:00:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: Helge Moulding hmoulding@excite.com
Reply-To: hmoulding@excite.com
To: Lynda Williams williaml@unbc.ca
Subject: Re: Story online
X-Sender-Ip: 209.63.114.57

Lynda,

Months ago you asked me to have a look at your site at http://rocketship.org/rel/works/stories/backout.html and give you some feedback. I agreed at the time, but then promptly forgot to follow through. Today I was going through my old saved mail, and found your email sitting there.

I'm so very sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope it didn't put you out.

I had a look at your site. I liked the story. I also liked the layout. It isn't fancy, but then I'm a web minimalist. Simple is Good. The point is that your visitors can find their way around, and know what to expect.

For a site that uses Shockwave, you're doing well. I personally think that Shockwave is a not-ready-for-prime-time technology, mainly because it severely misses the point of the web. But in your case it doesn't get in the way, which is all that matters to me.

Using two nav links on each page, one at the top, and one at the bottom, is probably good practice when the pages are long, but bmbycategory.html isn't, and the two links looked messy to me. Just my opinion. (I'm viewing the pages on an 800x600 monitor.)

I also don't know if you've noticed that the two links don't look the same. The top one has the <| design followed by the nav bar picture on the side. The bottom one has the nav bar picture below it. That may look messy to some people, or even broken. (I'm using Netscape 4.16, in case it doesn't look the same for you.)

Some of your pages, like clothing.html, seem a bit long. It may be too much trouble for you, but pages that long may work better as several sub pages.

You also asked what I thought of your efforts with FireWorks. The pages look nice, but you'll have to understand that from the point of view of usability they are quite bad. This isn't your fault, though. The problem is that web pages that are entirely graphical are useless for a lot of web users. A glaring example is people who use speaking browsers. With nothing but images to look at, a speaking browers just lists, "Image xyz.gif. Image pdq.gif..." We won't even mention search engines.

You can use ALT text to get around some of this problem, but I don't know if FireWorks lets you do that. (You do have ALT text for the link images on scene1.htm.)

The second problem is that using tables to arrange these images may not have the desired results for some of your visitors. Again, this is a problem when your visitors are using a text only or a speaking browser. Tables break down in a fairly orderly fashion, but that often ruins that pretty layout.

My advice here would be to make text only pages available as an alternative. That would be the simplest work-around. With some more work, and some familiarity with accessibility issues like the ones I've mentioned you can probably also make the FireWorks pages more usable.

Anyway, I'm hoping that this feedback is what you were looking for. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email me.

Page last updated: 10-Nov-2003

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