soodanim Posted December 6, 2004 Posted December 6, 2004 Still a little work needed on getting products into correct categories and replacing some of the original oscommerce images..... But just wanting input on the design....i feel it's still pretty "oscommerce"....lol plain...needs something else but what? Thanks in advance My Webpage Cindy
soodanim Posted December 7, 2004 Author Posted December 7, 2004 Oh the old site Old Site This is what the site owners have now.... Trying to convince them that is ugly....lol :rolleyes: and the fact it breaks all the time too isn't great....
burt Posted December 7, 2004 Posted December 7, 2004 Got to say that I prefer the old look. Sorry. The new one has too much white space, and the top/left of the boxes are missing? And that Specials box is just awful. What can be done about it? I honestly don't know :( You kind of have a halfway house right now, it's not good looking enough to make me feel like I want to spend money, but it's not bad enough to make me want to say "start again".
soodanim Posted December 7, 2004 Author Posted December 7, 2004 Interesting comments.... The new one has too much white space uummm what resolution are you using, the old one has plenty of white space as well, just all on the right if using resolution larger than 800 x 600 The top/left of the boxes are missing? ?? don't understand that comment, they aren't rounded if that's what you mean? I didn't want them rounded And that Specials box is just awful. what's awful about it exactly? It was a contribution I found, I like the idea of some movement on the site You kind of have a halfway house right now As note in the first post, I am still working on the products, it was layout suggestions I was asking for ;)
burt Posted December 7, 2004 Posted December 7, 2004 Too much whitespace between the individual items on your page. Not the page overall... If you like the idea of movement, then leave it on. But what you like is not sometimes what customers like... The top and left side of all your boxes is missing - it looks awful like that.
soodanim Posted December 7, 2004 Author Posted December 7, 2004 Too much whitespace between the individual items on your page. Not the page overall... If you like the idea of movement, then leave it on. But what you like is not sometimes what customers like... The top and left side of all your boxes is missing - it looks awful like that. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> OK well thanks for the comments...... One day someone may come up with a site that is prefect in everyway...lol Personally I like the boxes...there's a dropshadow and they are white, to create more of a 3d effect instead of being totally flat....will look at adding the tops and sides so that they are visible or back to flatness....but I wouldn't say "awful" :blink: oh well.....Maybe your brightness setting is high....or you are viewing on an LCD screen? and it's not giving you that effect at all.... You never said what resolution you were using..... I usually use pixels and not percent so may go back to that so the white space is less Thanks
Guest Posted December 7, 2004 Posted December 7, 2004 I got to agree, I like the old site better as well. Visual appeal has very little to do with what you may think is a great site. Yahoo!, Amazon are both nasty looking sites yet they are incredably successful. I would not waste to much time on what you feel may be a better design. The best way you can help your customers is in the functionality of the site. Don't take Burts criticism to heart, peoples honesty is what will make you a better developer. The ability to entertain an idea without having to accept it is a true sign of intelligence. Think about the points given to you, try to understand them and decide for yourself if that area needs improvement, don't just toss the idea out becuase you feel it is an attack of your character or skills. I like the old site more becuase it "feels" more professional. I'm trying to look at the two sites not as a developer and thats my gut instinct. The new design lacks professionalism. It looks, feels and behaves like a carbon copy shop with nothing else put into it as far as customer needs.
soodanim Posted December 7, 2004 Author Posted December 7, 2004 I got to agree, I like the old site better as well. Visual appeal has very little to do with what you may think is a great site. Yahoo!, Amazon are both nasty looking sites yet they are incredably successful. I would not waste to much time on what you feel may be a better design. The best way you can help your customers is in the functionality of the site. Don't take Burts criticism to heart, peoples honesty is what will make you a better developer. The ability to entertain an idea without having to accept it is a true sign of intelligence. Think about the points given to you, try to understand them and decide for yourself if that area needs improvement, don't just toss the idea out becuase you feel it is an attack of your character or skills. I like the old site more becuase it "feels" more professional. I'm trying to look at the two sites not as a developer and thats my gut instinct. The new design lacks professionalism. It looks, feels and behaves like a carbon copy shop with nothing else put into it as far as customer needs. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> No worries, I am taking in what has been said.....just like a good debate....lol Not taking it to heart at all.... Visual appeal has everything to do with a great site once the functionality is working, can't personally see anything wrong with Yahoo! and Amazon...lol But the way you present your products is going to make one heck of a lot of difference.... Look, feel and behave like a carbon copy shop ....ummmm they function the same way???? That is why I asked for comments on the design....What customer needs have been met by the Old Site that haven't been met on the new one....what am I missing? Alot of the new site is on the admin side... The old site has links available to users that "break" the site if used, basically requiring the server to need rebooting for the site to work again, and is not user friendly....Lots of scripting errors actually....Had no admin levels...everyone could sign in and do everything!! This was found out AFTER the Site Developer said it was ready to go, When we started inputting, we came across errors which when fixed removed what we had inputted, very time wasting and not to mention financial lose. This in my opinion was not very professional at all of the Site Developer, not much testing was put into the site before telling the customer to go ahead and pay people to input to have all the info lost again when he had to make changes. The old site only allows for a product to be featured in 2 categories, the customer wants multiple. The new site does. The old site has many products listed that vary only in a couple of changes especially in computers and notebooks...with the product attributes, 4-6 different product listings can be reduced to 1 with the product attributes used so the user can choose the computer and upgrades they want, the customer wanted this as the upgrades are what they are making the money on. The old site has no way of inputting multiple products at once, images descriptions prices etc apart from a update system from one supplier which deletes all products not from that supplier as it doesn't recognise them as that suppliers products..... The new site does. The old site didn't have admin levels...The new site does. What would you expect the Old Site to cost? outta curiosity Professionalism In my opinion is not saying a site is ready to go without testing it.... Anyways....I need you to expand on why you think what you do.....just saying it "feels" more professional doesn't help....lol
♥bruyndoncx Posted December 7, 2004 Posted December 7, 2004 since the difference is in the functionality and if you have a good customer base and brand (colour scheme) going - why change ? I'm assuming the site should maximize company revenue and not act as a show case for the designer ... customer/shop owner is king, unless you do a proper identification of the target customer audience and usability analysis, watching people shop/navigate the site and lots of polls and interviews to get real customer and potential customer feedback. KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON I do not use the responsive bootstrap version since i coded my responsive version earlier, but i have bought every 28d of code package to support burts effort and keep this forum alive (albeit more like on life support). So if you are still here ? What are you waiting for ?! Find the most frequent unique errors to fix: grep "PHP" php_error_log.txt | sed "s/^.* PHP/PHP/g" |grep "line" |sort | uniq -c | sort -r > counterrors.txt
Guest Posted December 8, 2004 Posted December 8, 2004 Anyways....I need you to expand on why you think what you do.....just saying it "feels" more professional doesn't help....lol Thats more feedback then you'll recieve from 90% of your customer base, most will like it or not, if they don't... they move on, plain and simple. Perhaps you had missed where I stated: I'm trying to look at the two sites not as a developer and thats my gut instinct Hence why it "feels" more professional. Symantically, structurally and design wise, my opinion is that they both fail miserably, stock or not. I love osCommerce but have you ever tried to "listen" to it? have you ever entertianed the thought of the hard of hearing, vision impaired or otherwise disabled people visitiing your site? This not as small a margin as you may think. Not to mention the fact that the code is insanely bloated, a css conversion brings the code base down to around 500k (my last site built with osCommerce was 543k) from just over 4 megs. If you want the details as to whats wrong with your site, its the same issue thats wrong with 99% of the outdated, obsolete websites produced and maintained on a daily basis. can't personally see anything wrong with Yahoo! and Amazon...lol Not gonna get into that... that requires more time and patience for me to explain then I have available to me at this point. The way you present your products does matter, the way you present the support you offer, the discounts, the price policies so and so on for said product. The way they look? far less important then telling potential buyers how your going to support there purchase in the future. these things are missing from the site, and I consider more important then design, I am sure your clients customers would agree, bring these up with them. how long is the warranty? do I get a warranty? how do i return an item if i got a problem? I do realize on some pages it says 1 yr on site warranty, in my opinion thats not enough for a thousand dollar purchase. You need more detail explianed perhaps on a seperate page. This is a big one: what country are you in? If I dial 09 443 8723, I can promise you that I am not going to get a business, I will an exchange telling me I dialed the wrong number... if i was a customer I'd move on. Don't forget about the people outside of New Zealand and make they know where and who they are calling. Same goes for the contact page. Also the same changes are needed for the shipping page where it states for example: North Island Metropolitan Areas - $25.00 I live on an island in a metro area... in Canada. you going to ship me a computer from New Zealand to here for 25.00? a customer may figure this out while creating an account or proceeding to checkout... at which point you have lost them. You sold em on 25.00 on shipping and want to charge a different rate now? On your shipping page you mention: Customers to return via courier to Manufacturer.Cost depending upon Manufacturers Return Policies. Wheres the manufacturer? what is the manufacturers plolicy? the product listing (category) pages are awful, they hurt the eyes, the layout is squished and the blue/white background thing going on draws more attention the products do. Also can't read the headers for the table (manufacturer, price etc.) Empty categories, this is a no no if your comparing wasted clicks, this is a wasted click for sure, offering a click to a customer who in turn gets a message saying theres nothing there. According to http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ it would take me aprox. 60 seconds to load the index page, another 30 seconds to find out i could not buy a Digital Camera from you... even though you initailly offer it for sale via the category link. Those are dialup times.. they count for a large chunk of users still. The specials box, this is an example of proprietary code, the MARQUEE tag is/was explorer only, while it does in firefox it probably doesn't in the other 100 plus browsers out there. It will display static text in everything else, and if it doesnt... shame on the developer of that browser for implementing microsofts standards backwards support (althou getting much better). Graphics on the right displaying account, contact us etc. I was gonna make a point first off asking where these items are located, hard to see, even harder to know they actually do something. Why do you have two different pictures linking to account.php? The standard date and hit counter thing. No one cares how many people clicked on your site since whenever and im sure even less care what you know what the date is. Replace those with something more useful (warranty page link) and shave some queries off the load time as well. Privacy notice issues Your account can be cancelled at any time you wish, and the removal of all your details from our database, just email theSite Owner using the Contact Us link from the header of all Pages this link doesnt exist, its hidden on the right hand side as an image. exactly what information is being collected? why is it being collected? to fulfill orders doesnt cut it do you use cookies and why? do you track browser information, usage etc? why? while these things may not seem important, they will be very important to a lawyer of a potential disgruntled customer someday. Conditions of use... I assume that wont stay like that so I wont bother. Design of the site is one issue, the design give the impression as if the site is a clearing house, a liquidation of computers and other electronics. I dont pay attention to pcs much but I think this is not the case and the design may in fact misrepresent the intent, or genre of the site/business. I think it needs updating to bring it into a more current pattern of what people are looking for, in the 80's this would have been great, today it screams discount superstore. I won't even touch on what happens when the site is viewed using a text/voice/brail browser. You want to design for cross browser compatability? triple boot linux and two installs of windows and linux so you can download virtually every combination of browser/os version, the thirds for linux and don't forget to buy the mac either. Welcome to web standards.... which might give you a clue to the problem with yahoo. I'm not picking on you, just clarifying for ya. I've been doing sites since 1996 and I still don't know anything, theres always something to learn, something to read and something to fix. Now, back to my printable invoice contrib :)
Guest Posted December 8, 2004 Posted December 8, 2004 Pardon the mistakes on that post, I wasn't "allowed" to edit them out.
connector4 Posted December 8, 2004 Posted December 8, 2004 Your web site is very to the point. The ?specials? info box bugs me tho. I recommend that you put it under the ?browse products?. You should look into fixing up your header. Good Luck
soodanim Posted December 8, 2004 Author Posted December 8, 2004 DevHype First off the site is not live, it is a demo site, the things you mention have not been completed....they are sample text only, sorry I didn't mention that. The site is New Zealand based only...hence the prices stated in NZD only This will also be sorted out when the correct text the customer wants is inserted. The ?specials? info box bugs me tho. I recommend that you put it under the ?browse products?. I guess its a given the specials box sux....lol and yes I did have it under the browse forgot to put it back....ooppsss You should look into fixing up your header. What's wrong with it? :'(
soodanim Posted December 9, 2004 Author Posted December 9, 2004 Now I'm playing with it again.... so will get back to ya when I'm finished.... Thanks for all the input....I think!! lol Cheers Cindy
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