freedomfootbags.com New and Improved... What do you think?

Genzu · Post by **Genzu** » 26 Nov 2005 18:40

Hello fellow sherdders.

The new http://www.freedomfootbags.com is finally done,
after over a year of work.

There are a bunch of new products too, all "sweatshop
free" so to speak. Simply check out the blog for
the latest items and updates:

http://www.freedomfootbags.com/blog/index.php

There are still a few surprises to come, so keep checking
in.

Please feel free to give us any feedback, positive
or negative.

Peace.

hackeysnacker · Post by **hackeysnacker** » 26 Nov 2005 18:45

it looks really nice and professional

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 26 Nov 2005 18:45

Awesome - props! Looks great

Muffinman · Post by **Muffinman** » 26 Nov 2005 18:58

It looks really good.
One piece of criticism that doesn't pertain to the new design is that I find there are too many subfolders for the online videos...I feel there is too much to look through and that lends to potential inaccessability.

Who did your design? It's great; it has a very Flipsider-esque feel to the format.

sampotter · Post by **sampotter** » 26 Nov 2005 19:02

I like it a lot! I'm glad you kept with the sort of new and hip feel yet made it related to footbag. A big improvement over the first design. My only criticism of the website is the same as Erik's.

shredzilla · Post by **shredzilla** » 26 Nov 2005 19:04

Nice! I really love the art style. Excellent!

JFootbagger · Post by **JFootbagger** » 26 Nov 2005 20:12

What happened to Matt Emming bags?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! I was gonna buy one for CHristmas!

Troyson · Post by **Troyson** » 26 Nov 2005 20:21

JFootbagger wrote:What happened to Matt Emming bags?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! I was gonna buy one for CHristmas!

yeah what the hell is up with that!!i really wanted to buy one also, now nowhere else has them

besides that the site looks great, they have the facile mr's and some other bag i forgot what its called, but in all it looks fantastic!

Post by **Allan** » 26 Nov 2005 22:37

Thanks for all the feedback so far

Erik Chan wrote:I find there are too many subfolders for the online videos...I feel there is too much to look through and that lends to potential inaccessability.

I'm not sure how to remedy this. Any suggestions? The issue is that we have a lot of video up there--almost 3gigs worth. I'm more than willing to re-do the categories, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to go about it. I recently added the Player Spotlights album in an effort reduce the clutter.

Erik Chan wrote:Who did your design? It's great; it has a very Flipsider-esque feel to the format.

A designer-friend of mine that I used to work with: http://www.projectmofo.com/

As for being Flipsider-esque -- hmmm. I've always appreciated Elli's designs, but I thought this was a substantial departure from his aesthetic ... go figure

As for Matt Emming's bags: http://www.freedomfootbags.com/blog/emm ... continued/

Note that we're also doing Gift Certificates now:
https://www.freedomfootbags.com/shredsh ... ucts_id=64

EDIT: updated Emmings blog post link ...

Outsider · Post by **Outsider** » 26 Nov 2005 23:55

In the beginning ...
... there was the hacky sack®. People kicked them around. Life was good, but somehow incomplete.

Great site, Daryl and Allan. I think its a very good improvement. My favorite part is the writing. All the verbiage (would it be appropriate to call it "the copy?") is very well written. It is informative, sincere, and not overly "sales pitch-y" or filled with phony over-enthousiasm. In short, its just right.

If its constructive criticisms your looking for though, I'd say that those three dialogue boxes in the center of the screen ("vids", "store," and "blog") could be stacked one on top of the other, rather than side by side, and perhaps some of the text (like in those three boxes in particular) could be a little larger. IDK, just throwing some ideas out there.

Anyway, great site.

Post by **Allan** » 27 Nov 2005 02:08

Thanks Jon

As for stacking the three sections on the home page--something to consider, I guess, but that's how the designer had it, so that's how I wrote the HTML

As for font sizes--agreed, the default should probably be a bit larger, however, as simple as this sounds, it's actually kind of a sticky issue for a web designer.

Most websites are designed with the fonts too small, therefore most users alter the default font size using their browser settings (in Firefox, you can do CTRL (CMD on a real computer

) + or - (CTRL 0 to restore defaults) and move the font size up or down according to your desire-- in most operating systems you can even simply hold the CTRL key and use your scroll mouse to adjust font sizes).

What this results in is a bit of a mess from a design standpoint when users who already have bad eyes and have already altered the default text size visit your site with already large fonts and get a mess of HUGE text that can have a negative impact on the layout of the page.

So, I generally tend to keep it small and design to allow users to alter the sizes themselves.

This is one drawback to the type of design that we've gone with on FF.com in that it doesn't really handle these adjustments all that well based on the "pixel precise" nature of the designers creation. But I've done my best to adjust.

Fortunately, I've coded the site in such a manner that I'm now able to employ "style sheet switching" which will provide users with an option for themes. The current design will remain the default, and a "lite" version will be far more plain and accessible. I have no idea when this might be an option, but it's probably not too far off.

Any web developers out there care to critique my HTML/
CSS? I'm kinda proud of it

There are area's of the shop that are generated by OSCommerce which produces horrible code out of the box and which I've hacked substantially, so things might be messed up a little and not be formatted nicely or quite validate, but it's a far-sight better than what it would be (it's almost all semantically correct!).

*Jethro* · Post by ***Jethro*** » 27 Nov 2005 04:37

I like it cause Ryan Mulroney is on the front page.

HG · Post by HG » 27 Nov 2005 07:08

Now i wanna try a dryden bag!

Kyle Hewitt · Post by **Kyle Hewitt** » 27 Nov 2005 10:10

The website looks great and I'm glad I ordered my Emmings bag before he stopped stitching

C-Fan · Post by **C-Fan** » 27 Nov 2005 10:32

Really beautiful. Looks very professional. Thanks for the hardwork, both with the website, and with promoting the sport.

scott behmer · Post by **scott behmer** » 27 Nov 2005 10:41

the new site is amazing. it was well worth the wait! i'm glad to see the new products up as well. one thing i kinda liked about the old site was the animation of daryl hitting rubberman. i think something like that would be cool on the new site to show what real freestyle footbag is, but i love the site as is also. you may get a bulk order from rain city shred in a week or two.

Jdigges · Post by **Jdigges** » 27 Nov 2005 17:53

I think its excellent. you guys did a great job. i like it much better then the old one

krawallier · Post by **krawallier** » 28 Nov 2005 12:56

great design - me likin it.

i found a liitle bug ... in the blog section the "what's" happening bar is not on the left side but below the posts... i assume this is not on purpose.

Markusss1988 · Post by **Markusss1988** » 28 Nov 2005 13:34

yeah, really nice design!!

it's a lot better than the old one

great job!

Edit:

Jdigges wrote:I think its excellent. you guys did a great job. i like it much better then the old one

Without looking at this post, i wrote almost the same!

Post by **Allan** » 29 Nov 2005 03:09

krawallier wrote:great design - me likin it.

i found a liitle bug ... in the blog section the "what's" happening bar is not on the left side but below the posts... i assume this is not on purpose.

Hmm. What browser are you using? Version? Lemme guess: IE on windows?

*sigh* IE is the bane of my existance. Does this happen for anyone else?

Thanks for all the positive words peeps

- A

modified

freedomfootbags.com New and Improved... What do you think?

How do you like the new FF.com?

freedomfootbags.com New and Improved... What do you think?