Portfolio Site

[Fido]

Hello, I'm new to these forums.
I would like a critique of my portfolio site at http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~tetler/
Any comments are appreciated. I would also like it if someone could critique my code as well. Thank you!

[filburt1]

If you're interested, here's what literally 0.1% of WDF users see when going to your site:

[Fido]

I'm sure it does use a good bit more bandwidth than the same animation in an image would; however, there's no need to animate it, and with CSS it could be done with half the bandwidth by merely using text, an unordered list, and some CSS directives.

No I mean an unanimated equivalent. It's a 6kb file, any image the same size would be much larger and not be animated. An equivalent PNG would be 30kb, so I'm content using flash. I'm not that worried about designing for the "middle" browsers, I design for the newest and oldest. It's a portfolio/entertainment so I'm not shy about using new techniques. If I were making a business site I would avoid flash but that isn't the case.

And Filburt I know that's what it will look like without flash support, and that's fine because it's still looks good and is navigateable, that's how I designed it.

Now I really don't care about this stuff because I've thought all of that over. I'm pretty thorough with compatibility, if it renders correctly for 95% of visitors that's good enough for a portfolio site.

What I'm more interested in is what your first impression is, how it looks, and stuff like that. I want a more art oriented critique since most optimization and compatibility issues, I fixed already. I've tested it in FF, IE, and Opera and it looks and functions perfectly in all of them. If you are using a mac and it renders very badly that I would care about. But as you said, I just don't need to bend over backwards for .1% of my users.

So I would appreciate a more art oriented critique since I haven't gotten any of that yet. I've gone through the validation stuff 1000 times, and I'm happy with that part.

Thank you.

[Shadowfiend]

Well, the users who don't use Flash 9 may run into issues. I'm not sure about Flash 8, but Flash 7 (at least on Linux) doesn't render the text on your menu options.

Also, my point remains that the image size is irrelevant if you achieved it with CSS, which is 100% binary-free. But I understand your point.

[Fido]

I don't think it is flash 9 actually, I don't have a recent version of Flash MX so it's probably 8.
I'm not sure what you mean by acheiving it with CSS. Could you be more specific?

[Shadowfiend]

Because CSS allows you to style boxes with various features, you can use an unordered list and CSS (borders and padding mostly, in this case) to achieve the same effect (albeit sans animation) without using any images. Granted, the rounded border is difficult to achieve (without Javascript) on non-Gecko/WebKit/KHTML platforms (i.e., no IE).