Smarty

[ephemerae]

i just have relaunched my portfolio of art & design works http://www.marcuswendt.de
the site is completely dynamic database driven, even the design-colorschemes, as well as some templates directly come from the database.

it's about the 8th project i've realized with smarty and besides some quirks i can say that this is still my templating engine of choice

[Milkman]

Looks good except there are no warnings that you are using Flash. I have, by default, flash turned off in my browser and it looked like it was broken or missing stuff. Luckily I'm used to turning flash on for some sites but other users may not be quite the same.

[ephemerae]

that's a point indeed - otherwise i dont think it's 'good design' to have these 'please please make sure you have flash v.XY if not get it here ... restart your browser ... and come back' warnings all around.
when using flash one should auto-detect it - a feature i have unfortunetly not yet implemented
but this is on top of my todo list - since that flash navi makes the site also quite useless for search engine robots etc...

[Milkman]

I've never been a great fan of flash. Mostly because of the plugin required to use them, and that I don't have the skills to create flash myself. I now believe that it has it's place on the web for presenting media/videos/games. You've made a good looking site. Perhaps the next step might be to try and move some of the flash (the nav might be a good start) over to html/css (and perhaps javascript).

Though I detest them, a 'banner' style page might be all that's needed. Just a simple 'Welcome to my website' image with a nice helpful message letting people know that your site uses flash and where they can get a copy from. You could also get the page to remember visitors and redirect them straight in if they have seen the page before. (A bit like how ebuyer.com remembers your country and auto redirects you on subsequent visits)
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MilkHub