RiverView Website | riverviewnorthcarolina.com

very effective and well designed solution! www.IgorSaraiva.com

i appreciate the comments - but you missed some very important aspects. The site is all about the experience, the experience of the Carolina Mountains (ever been?), and what it feels like visually, musically, and graphically. The music is from a local artist contracted by the client. The client also had a big role in choosing specifically what they wanted, sometimes against better judgement.

Just as a side note, the site has been nominated for 7 design awards, and since i have been designing for 15 years, experience trumps everything and delivering a project that exceeds client expectations is what its all about.

The intro feels completely unnecessary. People lose their patience when confronted with large flash intros and this one isn't very inventive, and the choice of font for the billion words feels clumsy. That you have to wait for another loader before entering the real site isn't very nice either.
The ragged edges of the 'frame' feels kind of unnecessary as well. You could either go with a)just straightening the edges, b)straightening the edeges and making it more like wooden paneling, or c) combining the vines and the wood and letting the vines be the 'ragged edges' instead of the background of the frame.
I do like the color scheme and the fact that you have a link that lets people view the whole of the background image.
I like the transparencies of the info area, but light text on a dark transparent background in this way is not good for readability. Especially considering flash generated text is notoriously hard to read anyway.
I like the idea with the polaroids, but you seem to have done a bit too much compression of the smaller versions.
All in all -like the idea, but it could stand a bit more work. Remember that design is never more important than things like readability, and keeping the viewer from getting impatient and moving on.
Well that's all I had to say, and they're just my opinions of course. Agree or disagree as you see fit. :-)