http://www.toshiedo.com.au - would appreciate any feedback about the work and the site.

thanks

I like the general idea but you have a lot of problems that need to be addressed. In case you didn't know I am a web application developer by occupation and have done a lot of study in usability and user interaction on the web. While your site does look nice and flashy, it suffers from a few problems that the average user would encounter.

First of all, when the page starts up, the first graphic by default is faded. For a minute I thought you just made the graphic very dim by accident until I realized you did this on purpose. So the initial look at it was one of lack of professionalism.

Second I had to make a huge leap to the idea that the bottom white box was some kind of scrollbar. Most users wouldn't take the time to investigate this and would actually leave thinking the first image is all you had on the page (which would make this very boring).

Third, the site is heavily dependent on flash and while flash is becoming extremely common, it is still going to make your site unusable by those who don't have flash installed or have it disabled.

Fourth, users are use to going in a vertical fashion rather than horizontal. Your site should always stick to a user's assumptions in the way of basic navigation and how they interact with a page. Like I said earlier, unless I really had been looking, I wouldn't have known this site goes horizontal.

Lastly I viewed this on a 1024 by 768 resolution and everything seemed very crammed together. The text was smashes against each flash slide and it needed some more whitespace to set off the important info.

I like the overall presentation but perhaps if you either made it into a standard flip book style layout or changed it to a vertical one then you might find your users will be willing to view it more.

Good luck with the site

As an average joe non-web designer, I did have a lot of the problems mentioned. My experience was I opened the site, clicked around on the dim picture for about 20 seconds getting no reaction, then closed the tab. I didn't catch the horizontal scroll bar because of it's non-standard color, and I don't expect there to be a horizontal bar down there unless I'm viewing an image that obviously doesn't fit on the page. The positioning and color made it seem more like some kind of funky text box. If something scrolls horizontally, I expect to see some kind of user interface closer towards the center of the screen with easy to notice arrows pointing either direction.

I went back after reading Martyr2's comments, and checked some more stuff out. I actually really like what I saw after clicking the "launch project" link. The text could stand to be bigger. It was slightly small to my eyes, and I'm a young 28 year old guy with decent (though far from perfect) eyesight. Someone like my mom or dad probably wouldn't bother trying to read that though.