http://www.itsmy-space.co.uk/ken/index.htm

Hi there, please could someone take a look at this site and let e know what you think, let me point out it's still a work in progress, the galleries a repeating this was so I could check all the levels loaded before going to the effort of editing all the images and the whizzing words in the galleries are temporary they will be replaced with much more subtle text effects and the words will be relevent to the galleries (I personally hate the words idea all together but the client wants them, so it's up to me to make them really subtle and convince him it's the right way to do it) the will also be more text on there soon aswell.
http://www.itsmy-space.co.uk/ken/index.htm

I like it, simple and neat... the only thing I have to point out is that you could make some flash animations more fluid and the whole site is a bit fast... oh, and some other animations could be coded instead of static? you know, for the initial waves, they could be coded so they don't look the same everytime, that would be nice....

The moving texts did bug me a lot but since they're temporary and the client requires them... I like the gray shades for color scheme, but why make the horse picture jump that much? Personally I would like a site with artistic photography to be very calm and peaceful with only soft movement.

For some reason the image gallery scrolling didn't quite work. It didn't move softly but (for lack of better words) it did make these tiny bounces forward. Also I wanted to scroll faster, but that wasn't possible. I didn't like it. It wasn't immediately clear that one can scroll by mouse placement (on the other hand this is quite common and help arrows or text might not look good).

For some reason 'Architecture' - link was covered by a gray box every time I clicked it. And I don't mean the intentional effect that appears with all the links. A bug, perhaps? Also perhaps it would be nice to give immediate feedback to the artist with some kind of a form or guestbook.

++ for the layout though. Just the way it's supposed to be. Very simple and welcoming but not boring.

thanks for the feedback guys.
ok first the jerky scrollers, it's smooth on my broadband connection and I have a reasonably powerful PC, but I found it was a bit jerky on my clients PC at home but he was using a slower PC and a slower connection, I think this may be due to the size of the images or it could be the fact that the gallery is a separate SWF imported on to a second layer although I don't know why that should slow it down.
Coding the waves at the begining, I'm not sure how to do that, this whole site has beena big learning curve for me as theclient wanted flash techniques I had never used before, any advice on coding this kind of movement would be appreciated.
Oh and the annoying grey block, over the buttons well that was a little test I forgot to take out, I was trying to see if I placed a block over the buttons it would appear and not effect anything else which it does and it will eventually be a way of highlighting which page you are on, basically the whole site is layered the intro (horses) and the galleries and contact page are all external SWF's imported on to the main SWF, which allows me to accurately preload every gallery. I was having problems with the preloader wanting to load the whole site from the start page which took a VERY long time so this way seems to work.

hey man,

like the overall look of the site, it's pretty smart and simplistic, but i wanted to make a suggestion about your scrolling thing....

why not have two buttons (to the left and right of the scrolling pictures) which control the scrolling when the pointer is over them? you could make them quite tall and possibly semi-transparent so you wouldn't lose the effect you have at the moment. Give each one a little arrow and a rollover colour change and it'll be a lot more user friendly, this idea would probably help with my other main problem with the site and that's that the images keep scrolling when you move the mouse anywhere else on the screen (eg the menu - v. annoying!).

cheers
DTR

You are a lot better at Flash than I am but I can't help thinking that most of the animation effects you've chosen are just there to show off. It's like "look at these cool whizzing bits and fade outs". It is very clever and technically well built but does distract a lot from the core message of the site. I would tone down the animation, slow it and let the viewer decide if he/she wants text bits flying about and images scrolling not force it on them. Just my opinion.