Please be honest!!! My new site

HI,

I launched my new ecard sale site.

www.greetingstudio.com

Please comment on the design and ecards and suggest any improvements!!

Nishant

Aaaargh - another Flash only site

i saw your romantic birthday cards. they are nice.

Thanks for your comments

Hey Jamie ,

Whats the problem in flash only sites???

Nishant

This is a commercial site, right? So how do I buy your cards? How do I send the cards I can't figure out how to buy? How do I pay for the cards I don't know how to send if I could figure a way to buy them? How do I kill that annoying animation?

How does your customer find you? Are you planning a multi-mega-buck media blitz, ads in print, on radio, and TV? It's for sure the search engines can't index you—there's no text.

Flash is suitable only for controlled clients like kiosks, intranet and extranet web-apps, or for "hey-look-at-me-what-I-did" self aggrandizement sites. MacroMedia and a lot of graphic designers will disagree, and they are wrong.

This a visually pleasing site* that could just as well have been coded in html/css/javascript. I understand that the product is a Flash object that requires demonstration. To write the site as Flash is overkill. It kills any hope of being seen in search-engines, cell-phones, PDAs, text browsers, screen readers, Braille pads, or any other assistive technology. (Are you subject to accessibility requirements?)

The graphic artist has done a good job. It is time to stuff him back in the barrel, pour some food through the bung hole, and call in a dhtml coder with e-commerce experience.

cheers,

gary

*Animation becomes annoying. The <marquee> and <blink> tags were rightly vilified. Animated GIFs can be turned off as the default, and older Flash clients allowed the user to turn them off. If Flash7 allows turning the 'movies' off, I haven't found the secret code.

We never thought of search engine optimization. We sell cards by sending mails to card site owners. Can you suggest another option of promoting ourselves.

Thanks!!!

Nishant

To speak for myself, anyway, sites that use a lot of flash, especially those that have flash that take most of the window, use a lot of loadtime on dialup connections, and even broadband connections if the traffic is high.

The cards you have that are in flash are okay, but you should have an option on the index page to show the rest of the site in good old plain HTML.

Also, having a version in HTML will allow spider bots to pick up keywords so you can get some traffic from search engines.

Thanks for your comments!
I will consider a HTML site.

Nishant

Quite a lot if you don't have Flash installed
Also, I agree with Prov's comments

It's also nice having it on HTML pages so you can use your "back" button.

Looking into the design, when I clicked on one of your categories, I was just presented with a list of numbers. I would rather see a series of thumbnail previews instead. I also couldn't just click on the ellipse around the number, I had to click on the actual number, which is a little hard with, say, #1.

BTW: I've never sent out an eCard before, but do people really spend $9 a card? I thought they were normaly free, or close to it.

We are selling ecards to webmasters of ecard sites. we are a ecard sales website.
The price 9$ is for webmasters to buy cards which is very very cheap.

Nishant

Ah, I see. That makes sense then.

I am starting to develop a HTML site. I am scrapping the flash site altogether, but will take some elements from it. I thought that it would be easier to have thumbs as well.

But I am also thinking of a shopping cart for my site. So I think it is best that my site is in HTML.

Also the "back" option is there in HTML pages.

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

Cheers.
Nishant.

and php?