New site up - Comments please

Hey there. I just got my new site up and wanted to see if anyone would take a look and give me feedback.

http://www.fashionbeau​tylifestyle.com

Thanks,
Brian

1 minute and 39 seconds to load... You have 3-5 seconds of attention span before people give up.

When loaded the site looks ok but the extra space above about etc looks too dominating wtih the rest of the design.

No contact form - not that hard to do with Flash.

Blue text on grey doesn't give much contrast but add a drop shadow and it makes it worse.

Thanks for the feedback. You must have very slow internet. It literally took my computer 4 seconds and it was a computer that never had downloaded these files before, so it was not cached. I have shown the site to about 10 people so far and yo uare the only one who thought it was slow loading. I will get more people to test it.

Thanks for looking.

It loaded super quick for me.
I like the design.

Loaded up fine for me... and looks very nice. A couple things:
- I notice when I reach the end of your galleries, the "next" arrow stays there and is live. I clicked on it a few times before coming to the conclusion there was nothing more to see.
- I like the way you've done the two navigation lists at the left and bottom of the page. But I think they should be consistent... one shows an underline where the "current" item is, and the other shades it in blue.
- From an SEO perspective, of course Flash is a bit of an issue. To make it worse, your <title> is "fbl_site" which is meaningless, and you have no meta description tag that would help you publish a short sentence or two to the search engines.
- Lastly, the site seems too tight to the top of the frame, I'd give it a bit of space.

Dave

The site seems fine now must have been a glitch on the link, though other sites loaded fine.

Thanks guys. I didn't put in any metadata yet and I realized last night that I never even set up the page title. Thanks for the reminder, I will update that ASAP. I need to do something about the search engines, so I might generate a very basic HTML version of the site. I really don't want to have two versions to deal with but maybe a one page description in HTML would be helpful for search engine optimization. It will be interesting to see how the search engines deal with this because I have read that the latest version of flash does make text readable to the crawlers like google. It has to be actual text of course and not converted to a graphic or broken apart, but most of my text is actual text in there so we will see.

Thanks again for your help and suggestions.

took about 20-30 secs to load on my 20meg line

could have been done using xhtml and css, which would load quicker, enable me to use my back and forward buttons to go through the pictures and be better for seo as well

would also work on computers that don't have flash too

in fact I see zero reason to have done this design in flash

otherwise it looks pretty good and I quite like the layout

Grumbledook,

How would you have animated the image gallery in CSS and xhtml? I don't know any code for that and I have done lots of sites. I would be very interested in how you would have done that.

I'm not too concerned about computers that don't have flash or a very slow internert connection. Let's be honest. My target audience is mostly agencies, businesses and fashion designers. They all use flash and have decent internet connections.

I am concerned with SEO, so Flash isn't optimal, but again, most of my business will be word of mouth and referral, not cold calls.

It took 9 seconds to load for me, which would usually get the page closed before it's done loading.

Aside from the concerns already mentioned, don't be afraid to use a pronoun or two on your "About" page. The repeated use of your name gets really tedious by the time you're done reading the page. Switch a few of them out for "he", "his", etc. =)

Loaded nearly instantly for me...

About 10 seconds to load for me.

hmm not sure where my reply from last night went ;]

due to the subtle animation I think you could do without it completely tbh
if you did want it though and wanted to avoid flash similar effects can be done with javascript