[stevethomas]

Some new things, some old and some re-vamped. Check it out:



http://www.stevethomas247.com/
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www.stevethomasart.com

[Gort]

Hi Steve - alright - this is based soley on an "if it were me" situation:

Worth Considering:
I am not real keen on the secondary navigation - it requires too much work - especially the "Links" secondary set. Why have you buried "My Work" on the "links" page? That doesn't make sense; just finding "My Work" required a bit of effort, and chances are some users are going to miss it altogether. I would make the global navset accessible on even the mainpage - lose the splash screen - incorporate it's message into the actual home page; by doing so you add more content and visual weight to the homepage thus embellishing your URL (meaning I have an address; I go to address and here's the stuff - no hoops to jump through).

A Show Stopper:
The pop ups I saw in your gallery are not sized appropriately; there are scrolling elements visible with window resizing set at "false"; if you're not going to allow resizing then get rid of the scrollbars (set to false), but make sure the artwork fits in the window with breathing room and isn't force cropped.

You have some pretty good artwork to show, so make it more accessible!

Worth Considering:
Also why just a Flash site? Now I have fiber optic DSL at home and a T1 at work. Almost every time I visit a site that gives me a choice between html and flash, I go for html, because typically a site that is presented entirely in flash (especially one for illustrator! ) is going to have a big preload; I don't want to wait (I want it now!). Html tends to load faster, and having a choice isn't a bad idea.

OK - that was maybe a little more than two cents:

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- Tom Carter

"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf" - Jack Kornfield

[Bilbo]

I'll second that. It definitely takes too long to load- you can probably reduce the filesize by compressing your thumbnails- use lower quality jpeg, or use gifs with a minimized palette- photoshop's "save for web" feature is really useful for this. There's also a small problem in your thumbnail menu- apparently you created each thumbnail as a button, and the large preview images functions as an active invisible button too. ( to solve this you should place a keyframe on each button's "hit" keyframe, and inside it place a rectangle which fits only the small thumbnail's size.)
As to the navigation- flipping through the pages using that strtip on the top of the screen is hard to notice and isn't right from a designer's point of view- it seems like that calendar strip is encompassing the entire page space, rather than being responsible for navigation in a submenu. A scrollbar or even a small "more" button right underneath the links will be much more intuitive to use.
Another technical problem- once you click a menu item, clicking it again causes unexpected results. best idea is to disable the active button so that it won't be clicked more than once in a row.
As Gort said- if it were me - i'd probably lose that clock - it really isn't a necessity in a portfolio website, and it seems to have no relation to the website in style or composition. Another thing i might look into is try to make the "info" text fit the style of the links text to make the site more consistent.
Nice images in your gallery

[stevethomas]

Wow. Thanks Gort and Bilbo, some very good critiques and suggestions. I had played around with the idea of just doing an html site and/or both. I figured my Epilogue gallery would suffice for the html fork of the road. I've changed the site a smidge (got rid of the larger mouseover images and replaced with some info on each image). After hearing your comments, I'll probably go back through it and change some more. I've heard similar problems people have had with the secondary navigation through the links section. I just wanted to incorporate the calendar somehow. And as far as the clock goes, I wanted to tie in the fact that the site is "stevethomas247" i.e. open 24hrs/7days a week. Hence the days of the week and dates.

Great advice though. Thanks a lot!
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www.stevethomasart.com