mondi Posted August 3, 2004 Posted August 3, 2004 Hey all, I need some fresh eyes to look at this and give me some honest feedback. My mom likes it, but she is my mom ;) At first I loved this site, then I kinda liked it... and after working on it for a while now, I hate it.. LOL This store is not yet live, feel free to do whatever you like. Some specific things I am looking for input on: General astetics, is it pleasing or does it send you off screaming... Loading time... I did some funky stuff with tables and images, how bad is it? Browser compatibility... Does it make you want to buy things ;) I know there are some issues with a few of the product pictures ugglfiying the layout because of table widths... I was going to delve into fixing that, and decided I should get some feedback before tackling it. My store Thanks!!! mondi
John Doswell Posted August 3, 2004 Posted August 3, 2004 well it is something diferent, loading time in germany on adsl is crap. i think the infoboxes should be one long box or one left and one right, having both next to each other dont look right, more like a table error. the idea of the featured product in the header is good and the colours match your site theme. well i dont know what else to say. greets john
iainshaw Posted August 3, 2004 Posted August 3, 2004 very slow - you're not using small images for your thumbnails and it is really hitting your download times. If you're going to sort stuff with your images anyway then sort this. It'll make a big difference. I agree with the previous reviewer that the dual column of infoboxes looks like an error I also like the product in the header.
Ketu Posted August 3, 2004 Posted August 3, 2004 Your site loads very slowly for me in the US. Some images on pages never loaded for me with firefox and explorer on a T1. I will bet this is metered bandwidth on a very busy server. A reverse lookup proved this to be true, as there are 500 websites on this rackspace server. As the above posters pointed out, dual colums are confusing for me for some reason. Maybe stack them? The text under your logo is hard for me to read. As are the bright blue links and text on brown bkgd in the footer and panels. The ornate tree and root borders are a bit excessive for my design tastes. I think the blackletter typestyle is a over used. When click to enlarge image from product page I see some of the images are larger than my monitor screen, so the box goes off the bottom. My screen is set to 1024 x 768. The images could stand to be sharpened up (like unsharp mask in photoshop) after they are at their final size. I would like to see the rotating product pictures slowed down and maybe put in the header or just replace the specials in header with rotating pics. It is too fast for my old brain and gives me an uneasy feeling. Like those japanese siezure bots :) -JD
ryanf Posted August 3, 2004 Posted August 3, 2004 its slow to load. The text below your logo is too hard to read. The animated gif is way too fast its annoying. Get rid of the double boxs on the left. Why do you have two pictures that are the same just one bigger than the other in product info? The enlarged picture is way to big, size them down to around 500 or 400 high. Get a thumbnail contrib. The size of your images is way to large which is killing your load time. They should be around 1000-3000 bytes not 50000 large each. If I was crafty, this would be a funny signature.
sharkey Posted August 6, 2004 Posted August 6, 2004 Design is awesome!, Double colums don't bother me, HATE the gif!, slow it way down or get rid of it.
sharkey Posted August 6, 2004 Posted August 6, 2004 Oh yeah, forgot, Load times are fine, pictures are too big though and just notice missing pics at http://www.medievalgift.com/online/index.php?cPath=3 I'm on a 3 MB/S connection.
mondi Posted August 8, 2004 Author Posted August 8, 2004 Thank you all for some great feedback! What a fantastic resource to have critique your work. Is load time any better? New Server!!! :) First, Bear, thanks for the putting the link in ;). I am a dork. Second. The first problem I am trying to solve is the loading time. Ketu, thank you for the wake up call with my server. I have been meaning to do something about that for a long time. I didn't realize they oversold THAT much. I just got a new VPS account and switched everything over. Hopefully that will help with loading time. The next thing I am going to work in is the images... I was trying to conserve space on the server by not having 3 seperate images for each product... so I just had one big one and was resising it. I wanted a really big picture so people could get a feel for the product. I think I made them too big though... and I do need to go with smaller thumbnails. Robinson: something different LOL. That's what I used to say when my mom would make some weird dish for dinner that wasn't quite great ;) That gif is actually flash... yes it is way too fast. So far Sharkey, you and I are the only ones that like the double colums ;) Mondi
rathcroghan Posted August 9, 2004 Posted August 9, 2004 Still slow, too much wallpaper for my taste and something weird with the border on right hand side. Is it meant to be broken and misaligned on store page ? (IE6 1024 x 780) Info box header backgrounds need changing as they are hard to read (mottled grey ?) Serious work has gone into this by all appearances. Good luck
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