Gundam Universe (Old) Site

I thought this was very impressive. Intuitive (to me anyway), won't give you epilesy, and able to get info. Visually catching.

Gundam Universe (New) Site

Very plain. Looks like they didn't move the old information to the new site. If they did, then they did a horrible job of making easy to find or even searchable.

Honestly, I was just impressed by the visuals of the Old Site. Maybe, a lot of people (especially people who hate Flash) will disagree with me. But I was quite taken by it.

It's so plain that the link is not even clickable

LOL. The link works now.

I dislike the old site just because it is poor web design to have audio default to on when a page loads.

edit: specifically on sites that aren't multimedia driven. It makes more sense on those types of sites.

I got bored of waiting for the old site to load at 30% and wandered off. So since the new one actually displays content, I'd say it's better. *is a flash hater*

I'm not necessarily a Flash hater, but in my opinion, if the purpose of a site is to deliver information, then making me wait upwards of 50 seconds to even see the menu presenting the options is no bueno. Sure, the old site looks pretty. It's got lots of shiny stuff. But after almost a minute and I still hadn't actually seen anything, I hit Back. The new site loaded almost instantly.

I actually got pissed off the with Old Site. Not being a Gundam person, I had a hell of a time trying to figure out what I could click and where I wanted to go. It didn't help it took forever to load. The newer website loaded fine and I was able to navigate easily. I also learned things about Gundam I never knew before.

Old Site New Site
----0---- -----1-----

It took a good minute to load, and the audio got real old real fast.

I think the new site is a more standard approach, though it's pretty plain.

I would say the new site is "better" but should be redone to match the content of the original.

Aside from games or pure marketing interactive teases, I absolutely abhorr flash-made sites. The navigation is usually pretty convoluted, your back button doesn't work, you can't open stuff in new window/tabs, and you often lose ability to right click (which can be useful for more than just stealing images). The the measly pluses such as CRAP FLYING EVERYWHERE is hardly worth the loss of intuitive UI design. And don't even get me started on the autoplay audio (hey I have an audio player on my PC thanks) or the bandwidth sucking eternally buffering embedded movie-based backgrounds/graphics...

The load is a bit of a pain. To the new site's credit it loads extremely fast compared to the old site. I didn't like the navigation of the new site. Maybe because I couldn't find any content of the old site in the new site. Also, I thought the moving background was cool *shrug*. The one thing that did confuse me about the old site was the chart/menu/text-thingy on the right. I didn't know what the hell that was for until I noticed that it was associate to the Gundam Images.

I'm curious how fast of a connection people have. It took 26 seconds from the time I clicked the link to when it finished the load. Mind you there was a 3 second gap inbetween the link click and actually getting to the page. I have a 15Mb connection here. It took 10 seconds the second time I went to the site (I know it was cached).