Mux Guitars Website Launch!

[fryovanni]

What I ment was, I was trying to be honest with my opinion so he could improve etc.

But I ment not to get all mad (at me) etc. As It was not ment to be a dig on his work or whatever. Just a simple critique.

That is exactly how I think it was taken . I was poking fun at the way you put it. I think you are great and wouldn't even think you are commenting to be mean. From what I have seen you try to be very helpful and honest with your thoughts, and that is very very cool in my book. The fact you even responded to my post with all those smilie things... Well it just shows how much you care.

Peace,Rich

[crafty]

Man, ya'll are brutal. I built this site mainly for ya'll to look at and no one else... especially since there's no way anyone else can find it... and so that ya'll would have a place to download my tutorial. I've seen TONS of more poorly designed sites with half the criticism.

Chris

Chris, you asked for our input. We told you it needs work. Yes, the tutorial is great, but the site needs some help. There are plenty of resources online to help you design a workable website that doesn't need any disclaimers or a manual to get around.

Personally, I think if the only reason why you built it was to provide the tutorial, everything else is completely unecessary and a waste of bandwidth usage at this point. The way Setch has his tutorial set up is just about perfect and isn't a bandwidth hog. If you're not selling guitars, why build a website that makes it look like you are?

[verhoevenc]

easy answer: for fun

Chris

[mushy the shroom]

Hey, it was certainly a good effort.. and website building is fun, which, as stated was partly the reason. Chris, don't expect most people to compliment repeatedly the cool sections, more likely most will try to help by pointing out the sections that need work (and, more often than not, this is done in a bit of a PG manner, slightly condescending). Now my input:

Flash can be nice for these kind of sites that should reflect a luthier's creativity and artistic talents, but in all honesty (and I've had quite a bit of experience with both) you can achieve a great effect with plain HTML. Not to say you should dump your flash version, but you might want to completely rework bits of it based off the demographic you expect to be visiting it (mainly PG, right?).

If so, I would make your front page a bit less artistic. This might entail adding am automatic text explanation to the "mystery-meat" buttons. Most web designers regard the idea of having to roll a mouse over a hidden link to try to figure out its contents as bad practice. I would have a nice picture of your guitar alongside some simple text menue items.

I think the site is so big because you cache EVERYTHING in the beginning right? Also are you sure the file is one meg? I tend to think it's less because it loaded reasonably fast on my conncection. You might want to seperate the slideshows into a different flash file so you don't have to load the big photos at the beginning.

If you are bent on having an interactive model of the guitar on the main page, I would render it digitally in either Photoshop or Flash, which has a great drawing engine. The photo isn't necessarily poor quality, but it is a bit bland (maybe something cool from an angle with lighting and shadows next time).

Render all the media you have in flash! I don't really want to download a .doc file that could be viewed easier in my browser on the same page. Same goes for music (you can find simple flash players to embed in your site).

I was going to say more, but I'm crashing tonight. If you want specific help or photo/html editing, don't hesitate to PM me, I'd be happy to help (as I said, I have had some experience).

It's good that you're getting into web publication, but I rarely publish my first work, especially in a new media (this is the first time you've tried flash?). For example, my first published html site had midis in the background, then text following the cursor.. then I gave up on it because I hate Frontpage. My first Flash page was a disaster, I pirated 16 random images that had very little to do with anything to serve as links. So now I'm embarrased that people actuallly got to see those.. anyway, good effort, and keep developing those skills. If that was your first, you're way ahead of where I was.

[lovekraft]

Woah - 1 meg flash file? That needs *bigtime* streamlining!

+1 - in fact, on my dial-up connection, "1 meg flash file" might as well be "Go away!!", since I'm not going to wait for it to load under any circumstances. Besides, most Flash on the 'Net is just showing off anyway, and generally (IMHO) not worth the wait - dazzle me with content, not special effects. I'm sure my preferences don't reflect those of the majority of Internet users, but if this site is designed to sell guitars for you, I am fairly typical of the musicians that I know, especially the ones who can afford to buy a hand-built one-off guitar.

Just my two cents, feel free to ignore any or all of this.

[crafty]

If you want to learn how to perfect your site design, start here.

I took a web design class about six years ago from a woman who designed the Tiffany & Co. website. It was one of the first commercial websites to follow W3C standards for usability and flash transitions. Spending some time looking over their interface and minimalist layout will greatly help your skills. Things like removing frames and eliminating sideways scrolling. Read up on W3C and learn how to optimize your image and script caching so that it doesn't take an afternoon to download everything.

[GodBlessTexas]

The page loads fine for me in Firefox, but as others have noted you need the latest Flash player from Adobe. That being said...

I personally would ditch Flash entirely and do mostly HTML. I would also read up on web usability. Some key things I think you need to address (I've been doing web design as a pro-am for 11 years now):

Using Flash for navigation is fine (I do it in Dreamweaver for menus), but your navigation is cumbersome and confusing. Your webpage should match the elegance of your guitars, but the whole Flash guitar body where you pick a spot hoping to find the spot that takes you were you want to go is more frustrating than usable. Also, it takes forever for the sides to move apart and the content to show up in the middle. Unless someone is really interested in your stuff already, they won't stay long enough to see it (research shows you have a very short time before people click away).

My advice:

Usability/ease of navigation is key!

Ditch Flash except where it makes sense - Menus and maybe some multimedia content.

Have a constant navigation menu/layout at the top or side that clearly says where it goes so that people can easily navigate the website.

Put something stunning as the opening page to catch the persons eye and get them immediately interested.

You have no real text past the opening page. That text should be on your "home" page, but bringing up a different page first, then a flash intro, then the flash home page is tedious.

I'm currently at work with dual OC-12 connections to the net and a 3.2Ghz PC with 2GB of RAM, so if it's slow and tedious on this system, it's not for any technical reasons here.

Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...

[jer7440]

I agree with GBT. Kind of hard to navigate.

[verhoevenc]

New update. You can hear the MuX E-Series guitar in one of my recordings if you venture to the MuX Guitars Webpage and navigate to the "tones" section (by clicking on the tone control of the big guitar). Just thought I'd share that.

Chris