Owner: Steve Miceli
Editor used: Flash
Comments from developer: There is beauty in simplicity. After 12 years of working with interactive media, graphic design, and motion design; one gains experience in the complexities of design only to come full circle and realize that simplicity reigns. This is the latest self-promo site of Steve Miceli , currently explori
Technical Details:
CSS: Invalid
Accessibility: Invalid
Page size: 42935
Download speed: 9.96 seconds on a 56K Modem
Comments from Jennifer Kyrnin: As you may already know, I'm not a huge fan of Flash sites. But Steve did a nice job, on the surface. The page doesn't validate and the HTML is boring and table-based. Plus very little of the site contents is included in the HTML. There is only one link on the entire page if you don't see the Flash.
So, then I take a look at the Flash page. It's pretty, the movie at first flies by a little bit quickly, but is fun and keeps my interest. I'm very glad that Steve didn't use sound. That would have made it annoying.
But when I look at the page, I see two icons in the middle that may be links. When I mouse over them, they change color and my mouse changes to a hand. But I have no idea what they are for. There is no title text or any clue as to what I'll get when I click them. This makes me disinclined to click on them.
Another interesting feature of this site is that all the HTML displays below the Flash movie. But because of the size of the movie - I had no idea it was even there. It's very important to make sure your pages don't have scrolling blocking graphical elements like that. It's not that the scrolling was physically blocked, but that the design of the page gave me no clue that I could scroll. I found that HTML when I skimmed the source.
This site is not accessible, or very usable. I would see if I could adjust it to address this - make the HTML valid and use better CSS. Add some explanatory text somewhere on the page, or do something to make me want to go somewhere. As it stands, the site starts out with a pretty movie that ends up nowhere.
URL: http://www.micelistudios.com/