Toshiedo
Toshiedo
Owner: James Mason
Editor used: Adobe Flash, Adobe Dreamweaver
Comments from developer: The Toshiedo site was designed to show off our portfolio in a clean elegant style that also reflected the calibre of work they can expect from us. We wanted our clients to know straight away what kind of work we did, so we created short video screengrabs to get a feel for each project.
Technical Details:
Code: Invalid HTML
CSS: Valid
Accessibility: Invalid
Page size: 70988 bytes
Download speed: 15.35 seconds on a 56K Modem
Comments from Jennifer Kyrnin: This site is very pretty. It's definitely a designer's website. Unfortunately, this very design ends up punching some of my most hated design (dare I say it?) clichés. For instance:
Ironically, I like the websites James has designed a lot more than I like this portfolio site showing them off. If the goal of this portfolio is really to get new clients, then I would suggest making it easier for those clients to read. However, if the goal of the portfolio is to give James another avenue to show off his Flash skills, then perhaps it should remain as it is.
URL: http://www.toshiedo.com.au/
Owner: James Mason
Editor used: Adobe Flash, Adobe Dreamweaver
Comments from developer: The Toshiedo site was designed to show off our portfolio in a clean elegant style that also reflected the calibre of work they can expect from us. We wanted our clients to know straight away what kind of work we did, so we created short video screengrabs to get a feel for each project.
Technical Details:
Code: Invalid HTML
CSS: Valid
Accessibility: Invalid
Page size: 70988 bytes
Download speed: 15.35 seconds on a 56K Modem
Comments from Jennifer Kyrnin: This site is very pretty. It's definitely a designer's website. Unfortunately, this very design ends up punching some of my most hated design (dare I say it?) clichés. For instance:
- Black background with white (and light grey) text. Many people feel this is elegant. I find it hard to read and in most cases hard to do well. In this case, James doesn't do a bad job, but combined with my next peeve, it makes the portfolio virtually illegible.
- Tiny text. In this case, when I measured, the text was around 10px high. That is insanely small for most people to read. And to make matters worse because this site is 100% Flash, I can't use my browser to resize the text to make it legible.
- 100% Flash. Yes, James has added a "display: none" div at the top of the HTML to try and fool search engines into thinking it's content. But all it was was a list of keywords repeated over and over with a few links thrown in. If this site were being evaluated for SEO, that would be a huge red flag as most search engines would (rightfully) see it as spamming and possibly even remove the site from their database.
- Scrolling to the right. Since this site is 100% Flash, it was fairly simple for James to set up the portfolio to be one long scroll to the right and not even engage the browser scroll bars. But honestly, what does this gain? Most people, when they browse the Web, keep their mouse over by the vertical scroll bar. Forcing them to scroll horizontally just annoys most people.
Ironically, I like the websites James has designed a lot more than I like this portfolio site showing them off. If the goal of this portfolio is really to get new clients, then I would suggest making it easier for those clients to read. However, if the goal of the portfolio is to give James another avenue to show off his Flash skills, then perhaps it should remain as it is.
URL: http://www.toshiedo.com.au/