SITE REVIEW: www.gobendy.com

Hi!

My first site!

It's going to host all my music! Some content is still absent.

http://www.gobendy.com

Let me know if you get any problems with the navigation.

So far I like the site. I think it is well designed. The cartoon picture of the snowboard chick is nice. Did you design that graphic?

I think you did a good job with the flash. Many sites who use flash do not use it correctly, which end up making their site look "tacky". I think you did a great job of making the site professional looking instead.

Your pages seem to fit together well, even though each page has a different color scheme with your flash design. It still works for me.

Just thought I would point out that on your music page the copyright mark in the bottom left corner of the flash page is done slightly different than the rest of that pages. Nothing really important, but I just noticed that this one has a grey background while the rest of them just go over the main background for that particular flash page.

Overall your site doesn't really seem to have much content and where you do have content its all comprised in the Flash design which search engines from what I know will not be able to index. I am not sure if search engine traffic is going to be important to you, but the way it is now there is really nothing on your pages that will be indexed. Meta tags will not really do much for you. Maybe think about making a non flash version of your site where all the content is indexable (not sure if that is a word).

I haven't reviewed a site in awhile...but I thought I'd do this one since it was sorta "prominent" for a bit...

Overall I like the site.

The info page I'm going to assume is under construction....my first thought was I'd like to know "who Bendy is". Then the part of the legal disclaimer had me curious...but obviously nothing there. (I'm just assuming that is forth-coming.)

The thing I was wondering how you were going to handle is the Music page. I'm on Win98se at the moment and the Flash is fine, but I use Windows Media Player for MP3 files and get prompted for a download when I click your file links. (I also have Real One -- which I would have assumed would have played them -- WM Player did it just fine...which is what I prefer) -- but I'm curious about what you are going to do with the Lyrics and Tracks sections on your Flash.

My final thought echoes BWM's...about content and search engines. Since Flash isn't going to give the engines much to go on, you may want to consider adding additional meta tags to sorta "help them along".

Overall I like the site -- and unlike some of today's contemporary music, I even like the tunes.

i like the site, i think you have done a good job with the design, it all blends in well.
when i clicked on one of your music, it gave me the option to download, when i did i realised it was the full song, which makes no sense because i think you are planning on selling the album?. best bet is to make a html page and insert consoles into them to play the music. because if people can download them, they will not want to buy them

For the most part, I like it. I think u will prolly progress more on that site as u learn more about flash. I dont really like the looseleaf backround (maybey its cuz Ive been doing hours apon hours of homework on it), I think u could make a backround that goes better with that layout.

well if this is your first site than you did a great job! The main page is nice and fresh, and I like the little puzzle layout you have. Just get more content going and you'll be all set

Very helpful feedback. You are right that the content is the next important task (and probably the most difficult)

I will be creating a non-flash version at the same time as I do the content.

I did do the cartoons myself. I didn't realise that I could before starting it in flash so I was very suprised with the result! (though it did take me quite a while.

What I did was did a rough sketch on paper, scan it in, and then import the bitmap into flash. You import the bitmap into one layer and then draw over it (with your mouse) on another layer. You can then delete the bitmap and tidy up your drawing by dragging points around.

For the animation, I did the above and drew on multiple layers. When I drew with the mouse I tried to be less accurate so that you get the wobble effect by showing 2 or 3 images at a time. There are 7 images in all for each animation.

I think I will shorten the length of the MP3s so that a) there is quicker download, b) don't get the whole track, and c) it doesn't take up loads of space on my webserver. I do still want to do a new track each week though, to make people come back...

I hope to get much more content up this week...

Thanks for your help

Any additional comments greatly appreciated.

Bendy

Hi folks,
I've been messing around with MX 2004 today for the first time. It's a lot nicer (but has crashed on me twice though)

I have made some changes to my site and would apreciate some feedback (you may need to do a shift-refresh if you have seen it before).

Changes:
Background graphics on "Info", "Shop" and "Pictures"
Various selectable blogs on "info"
Picture view on "Pictures" (I'm sure you'll notice that I nicked some of that from the MX samples)
Illuminating green, for the hover, on buttons throughout

Also, I have locked the scroll bar in the HTML...

What do you think?

Bendy
--
http://www.gobendy.com

I like the torn paper effect but I'm less keen on the animation. That doesn't really add anything, I don't think. Also, not sure how good an idea it is to turn off the vertical scroll bar. Because I have the Google and Alexa toolbars, my screen set to 800x600, and large IE buttons, I could only just see the top of the jigsaw pieces in the bottom right. An inexperienced internet user wouldn't know how to get around this and so you would be alientating some of your visitors.

Aaron

Yep,
You're right about the scroll bars.
I'm going to get that changed as quick as I can.

Hmm i like the idea i really do and i love the chick but what about maybe a diffrent background colour?
Of the top of my head i cant really suggest a colour im jst not too keen on the black. not saying it dosent go just it dosent work for me personaly. People might feel differently

I liked the idea of the cartoon drawn on the notebook paper, but I think that it takes away from the effort put in on the flash. Did you draw the images yourself or was that done by someone else. Great site and interesting music.

I like the scrollbars and the colors. I don't like that adverting up on top. Can you get rid of that??

very good work for start
ur arrow keys ( news ) make some space between them. in the end of the page i see a big empty space but when i select that area i found hidden text ... black text like ur news. fix it , may be overflow or may be u forgot to delete that
totaly good work and nice idea . i like this idea for ur flash movie

Overall a very nice site, how much did MX 2004 cost you and is the difference substantial? The sites layout is good and the colours work well however you will find that in site building it runs from, Amaetur - HTML, Novice - Flash and HTML, Advanced - DYNAMIC, ASP, php etc accompanied with mostly graphics and flash, on slower connections flash takes some time to load and also requires a plugin.

Theo - http://www.t6d.com