Hey guys, I’m just putting the final touches on the website here and before I go nutso and announce it to the world I wanted to get some feedback here for those of you that have a couple minutes to spare. Overall I’d love to hear what you think about how it looks but I’m even more interested in how you feel about the navigation and the overall ease of use. There’s a couple things here and there that I haven’t finished but as far as the rest is concerned I’m pretty much calling it done. So if you have a minute or two and want to head over to www.ironbellystudios.com and let me know what you think I’d really appreciate it.
Visually, looks fine. Was kind of slow to load pages in general, mostly at the start probably due to the intro video (?).
I didn’t like the way the navigation on the right works though - because it is constantly scrolling, it was difficult to click on the thumbnail that I wanted. I think I would prefer it if it was static until I got near either the top or the bottom.
I’d probably also prefer the Menu button to not follow my mouse vertically, instead just stay in one place.
About Us - I’d add an extra line between each paragraph and maybe some kind of photo as the big wall of text looks unappealing and I immediately think “tldr”. Same with the other text pages. Overall the text pages could probably use some improvement in their legibility - a bit more “white space” and padding would help.
In a 1080p screen, the text window is quite small with a lot of “wasted screen space” and is off to the right side which I’m not a huge fan of. I’d probably prefer just standard, in the middle of the page, maybe 960px wide and full screen height. This would allow you to add more white space in to make the content more readable too.
Contact page didn’t come up when I tried - showed as Loading for awhile, then that disappeared and nothing happened. After this, none of the other pages seemed to load either.
Fix those things and I think you’ll have a nice site
Well it is certainly interesting and I guess it suits your purpose. There’s definitely a lot of great art there, which I liked.
However, generally I don’t really like that interactive websites where a lot of stuff is moving on the screen (left and right, as well as fading background). I don’t mind them getting interactive when I actually want to, i.e. clicking on some art and then getting interactive content to view it. That is however all a matter of personal preference.
What I think you should work on a bit is the initial loading time. That’s a big no-go for me. If I click on a link or open some website and I see nothing but a loading bar and that bar is still there after more than a second, I’m gone. In this case I think it was 3+ seconds. Again, that’s why I personally prefer interactive content on demand.
All in all I believe the theme fits what you’re doing though.
I’ve got to agree with cynic, although I will say it more strongly, that kind of deeply interactive flashy web site is very 2005, and there’s a good reason: all the fancy stuff does is make your content harder to access (e.g. it took me a good 20 seconds to find the portfolio links).
Look at every almost any major game site you rarely get more than one cycling banner with a forward/back button, and maybe some highlighting on buttons (which is usually subtle).
The hip modern web 2.0 apps take it one step further with minimalists sites being the order of the day, they stay 100% on message by providing only elements that support their core message. Remember you can always show off your content with a video.
I had the same thoughts about the menu button but ran it by some UI folks who said having it hidden was a bit more modern but with the left and the right side moving about I agree it does get too busy there so I’ll go back and keep the menu on the left open and fixed.
There is another layout that I’m considering that does keep it in the middle and offers some more space to play around with but the one thing I do appreciate about having this off to the left is that it leaves more room for the art, which is really what people are there to see judging by our traffic stats and most view pages. I completely agree that the text isn’t the funnest to read so I’m going to do a little more hacking and slashing to see what I can do to make it easier on the eyes. Thanks for your feedback!
Yea, I realized after you posted this that I hadn’t turned on site caching or minify so now that that’s going and turning all these heavy dynamic php files into static cached html files the loading should be a lot faster now. Got the left menu fixed and open from the get go, thanks for your comments there
Well maybe 2011 but I get your point. What I want here is something where the UI is what’s minimalist so that the attention is on the art work and it grabs you as soon as you walk in the door. Given I want to make sure people can get through that door quickly and into the portfolio and other sections, which I think having that menu open and fixed from the get go with all your options laid out in front of you will help there. Right now our main clientele are indie’s and so I’m catering more towards them rather than larger more business oriented studios, which is why the site is learning more towards that bad ass feel as apposed to a cleaner more professional and minimalistic UI. When you see me revamping the site again further in that direction maybe it’ll be a sign that we’ve shifted our target audience to those big studios but right now we’re loving working with the smaller outfits. I really appreciate your comments though, thanks for taking the time to let me know what you think.
Alrighty, I found a couple tools that let me rip the site apart and expose all of the culprits causing slow downs. I’ve gotten the load time down by another 300% or so so with any luck it should be loadable for you now.
honesty I hate flash as a user. And your hole site depends on it.
If you want to load something, thats ok but dont block access to the importent stuff while its loading. I would come to your side to find information not to wait for a video to load.
Also I really dont like the hover effect on your buttons. Way to much jumping around, moving from left to right etc.
Normally I would have closed the site immediately and would say to myself: “Nope. No interest in that”
Wow, the site was really impressive to me. Only issue is that the navigation bar obscures the background images. It might work better placed on one of the edges instead of the middle.
You violated one of my biggest pet peves about web design… the automatic audio overlay.
I find it extremely intrusive to have any type of audio automatically play when you load a webpage. I often have multiple tabs open simultaneous and the last thing I want is a giant deep-base ruuuuumbleBOOM coming over my speakers, and then a mad dash through my tabs to find out where the offending web page is so I can SHUT IT DOWN! The intro itself is pretty cool, but honestly is a case of something cool being used in the wrong place… keep it to video intros, websites don’t need intros… just show me the stuff!
In addition, you have two “pause” buttons on your page (which is the first thing I looked for… not your logo… not your work… where’s the pause button??) the first pause button didn’t work and made me annoyed. the second pause button worked but then I was left wondering what the first pause button did or didn’t do?
A few points on design…
Your overlay menu is “overlaying” too much… meaning it get’s in the way of the visual content. on my screen, it cuts the head off ironman, and is barely readable on some slides that have a lot of background text.
too many popups and inconsistency. You have popups on top of popups… if I click into your portfolio the sub section popups which is fine, but to see an expanded view of any slide that then popups on top of my other popup. while popups can be a useful design feature, here they are simply cluttering the space. Also they don’t perform consistently. Closing the popup slide works as expected, however in order to close the portfolio popup I have to scroll either to the top or bottom of it and then click the x… I can’t just click off to the side like the slide popup. Also I can’t see the menu to navigate unless I go through this process as the menu is getting covered up by your content, which is a paradox, because 2 seconds before I couldn’t see your content because of the menu.
As others have said while everything is pretty slick and you obviously put a lot of time into it, the flash experience is out of fashion these days. “Web 2.0” killed it… mostly for the best. Overall, I’d say you need a redesign. Maybe not immediately, but a redesign is in your future. This is a perfect example of form over function, where the cool stuff you’re trying to do is severely interfering with the basic stuff people NEED to do… like navigate easily. You have about 3 or 4 seconds (literally) to interest someone in your page, the worst thing to do in these 4 seconds is to force them to try and figure out how to use your site.
I’d recommend to put your site up. Take your time and jive on it and what other people have said here. Then go back and revisit at some point down the road.
What is it that you would like your user to see first?
Right now the focus goes straight to the background.
To many things moving, it is distracting, everything is screaming for attention.
Dump flash, it is slow to load, and
Kill the audio, it pretty much guarantees that no one will leave your site open in the background.
Site is not responsive. Have you tried it in mobile?
navigation of the right side bar is bad, you try to click on something and it moves away before you can click it. I should not have to be chasing something to click.
Just a heads up to all the flash haters(I count myself as one of those), there’s zero flash on this website. The embedded vimeo player might be flash enabled but that’s out of my control, or at least I haven’t bothered to check on their html5 version The rest of it is powered by ajax and html5, which I believe was the definition of web 2.0
I agree about the 2 pause buttons, I’m looking at an updated layout that makes the whole audio thing a little more distinguishable. I normally am in the same boat in terms of offending audio, I remember having a very staunch position on it in the past but because one of the key services we offer is music and SFX I figured it’s not a bad idea to give people a taste of what we can do. I’ve reduced the volume fairly dramatically but perhaps it needs to be cut in half again. It would be nice if vimeo allowed you to set the default volume on embedded videos, might have to reduce that too.
Overall with the navigation obscuring the background, that was something we discussed last night where we could just hide that menu but people agreed that it was better to obscure a bit if it meant throwing the menu in people’s faces instead of having them look for it. Overall though the background stuff is mainly just decoration and to see the high def stuff I would assume people might get their interested peaked from the background and then go look at it in the portfolio.
Thanks for the feedback though, the other option I have here is removing that thumb bar on the right side entirely and just having the background slideshow go on it’s own without it. There would still be the controls in the bottom right corner but no thumbs along the right. What do you guys think, should it stay or should it go?
Goldbug: We’ll be implementing a mobile specific layout in the next week or two
Reduce it to 0. Really, you don’t need it, and I don’t think I’m overly biased about this particular point. Give people the option to understand your audio services, but don’t force it on them. Overall, the web is a visual medium more than an auditory medium… your browser is built to arrange visual experiences (tabs, scrollbars, navigation etc). browsers ignore audio completely, so audio experiences need to have explicitly defined controls on your page.
I don’t mind obscuring the background content if it’s just decoration, but for no reason should you allow “just decoration” to interfere with your navigation. This is happening on some of the busier backgrounds that also have text. They are competing and creating visual clutter.
However I would argue that your background content is not decoration… that it’s really the feature of your page where people get a quick peak into your latest, or most impressive achievements. You don’t need the sidebar in this case… it is redundant and hard to see anyway. But you should make sure that this main content and your navigation live well together. Overlaying is fine as long as it works. Here… on some slides it works and on other slides it doesn’t.
Well the sidebar got the axe, thanks for the feedback there… I’ll have to look at how I can have the menu bar stand out more on the backgrounds here or rethink the slides so they dont’ conflict as much with the menu
You guys do great work. I enjoyed working with you and hope to work with you again. And, I think your website could use a few tweaks (listed in order).
The music/noise was annoying - screams ‘close-me’! Unless you are selling audio services, the ‘cool’ factor is not worth annoying customers.
The background, foreground, and menu system seem at odds - competing with each other, instead of guiding the eye where you want it to go.
The background images are competing with the foreground data - and kept moving the whole time.
The stippled-dimpled-poka-dots overlay on the background images was very ‘meh’ - smaller images that feel higher-res would be more attractive. Consider putting these images in a banner portion, sliding in from right to left, etc…
The art itself - especially the thumbnails, is fantastic! You guys do great work, and I don’t think this new website shows it off much better, just differently.
Its 2014, people have far better machines and much faster internet connections than they did in 2005, so ignore all these dumbasses complaining its “too Flashy”.
I like it. More sites need to be like it and need to stop being so drab boring pages.
Thanks DMan, it was my hope that the new site would come across a lot more modern as apposed to old school as people seem to feel it looks. Overall I’m going to be revisiting it here, looking at the music and carefully curating the background slideshow to make sure it jives better.
Great to hear from you Gigi, I really appreciate your kind words there. The stippled overlay is to bring out the actual menu’s and gallery images more, I feel without it then those background images would really be fighting for even more attention. going to look at remixing the video to tone down the volume levels and the new layout will have a clearer audio controller that most likely will start paused.
Looks good. And feels like game company web site, with is really good.
I just with loading bar to looks more in site style. Currently I have feeling that it going out of context.
Everything else is just great
Hey Lacost, thanks for the feedback, the new layout tweaks change the loading bar to something a bit more in the style… the rest of you’ll be happy to know that the music is no longer playing be default, it has to be turned on with the play button in the top left now.
