hi there,
there are no rules out there on whether to have intros or not. i hav built sites where they have intros, and where they dont have intros. it has made absolutely no difference in the amount of users which have visited and continued through the site.
your intro is very short, takes near no time to download 9im on bb), and it quite nice and effective, something which i dcould see your target audience liking.
i dont like the noise at the start, if you are going to have a noise then maybe a short noise , like a board on snow, something that is releveant, but to be honest, you dont need noise at all, it takes up a lot of bandwidth
the use of the flash is debatable. it certainly wont drive people away in the millions, from requiring to download the flash player, a massive % of people have the flashplayer nowadays. one thing i would say, is the menu on the left, it closes when you go to a page. this is a no no, a a user then has to open your menu again. people dont like this, they get confused and then piss off. either lose the menu, pass variabels in the url for the flash movie to open itself at the correct position, or simply put the flash menu into an iframe. essentially, you need to use flash to enhance a users experience, and whilst your intro , header and menu are ok, they dont have any wow factor, and doenst enhance a users experience enoguh to justify the use of it. though, an easy way around the possible flash problem, is to have some code which detects a flash player, and if it detects it, then loads normally, otherwise, inserts a html based menu. relying on flash for your menu is risky.
having people login to buy, well i do on my sites, and people wont mind. ok some will, but you cant please everyone. having them login to buy is exteremely important,, you need to know who your customers are, you need to be able to market back to them. maybe create a news letter to entice people to create an account, or a competition.
where you have all the links at the bottom of the page, move these into a site map, then just have a linka t the bottom to the site map, will tidy it up
in respone to silly jokes, there arent markets out there who like or dislike flash, people dont go round the net looking at sites and saying, this is flash im not looking, but it is certainly a characteristic of a smnall % of your market which you may or may not choose to address.
used properly, flash can be extremely good and effective. the most important thing is the file size. always use vector graphics if you can, and very small if any sounds, add some php scripts to detect flash, and set a global var saying showflash = true or flase.
heres a flash site i have been working on. notice the download times, they are very small, yet the site enhances the users experience alot. thsi is the bb version, and it isnt finished yet. i will also create a non bb version, which will dyanically load in smaller photos.
http://www.webgremlins.net/simann/final/indexflash2.cfm
by the way, youmust by law have the following on your site
full terms and conditions of sale
a return policy whcih statesthe 7 day cooling off period. if you dotn have thism, then customers get three months in whicg to return a product to you
you must state your returns policy, otherwise the customer is allowed all money they have paid for p and p back too
a data protection policy
be registered with the data protection dept (voluntary, but highyl recommended)
have full postal and contact details
anyway, i have been as constructive as i could be, and it is all in my opinion, but i have been developing ecommerce stuff for years, and i own ecommerce sites myself,
hope this helsp
j
