Website Review

Webmonkey

Hi There,

Have being working on a website for a client there the past few weeks.

The address is: http://www.openo.co.uk/openo/

Just looking on some feedback on it. - Navigation/Design/Browser Issues etc

By the way the Homepage and maybe one or two more pages have not yet being completed so ignore them. More interested on the Shop/Products page.

I've used mod_rewrite as well for a change as well - wasn't as difficult as I thought

Thanks

cgarvey

Nice and clean, and seems to portray your message quite well. Couple of things I found (and they're all just personal opinion):

+ The gradient on "High Powered..." in the logo makes the tag a bit hard to read
+ The image buttons on the Products page are hard to read (text is pixelated/compressed and small), and don't scale
+ The shade of green used in heading text, against the grey background is a bit hard to read. I think this is more just at the top of a page (because of the darker grey background gradient)
+ On the individual product pages, the "Add to Cart" button isn't all that obvious. Take this page for example. Your "Add to Cart" uses the same icon style as the properties of the product and is down the page. I see 2 things wrong with that. First is that it's not at all obvious that Add to Cart is an action and Visible At Day is a property/metadata because of the similar icon use. Second is that the Add to Cart should be more prominent with, maybe, a second button at the end of the product textual description (that way people who know what the product is, and are just double checking, can click straight away, and people who read the description start-to-finish will be that tiny bit more tempted by the button at the end).
+ The validator links are last semi-decade! I mean anyone who knows what they mean, or cares, will have the ability/tools to do the lookup themselves. I put these in the same bucket as the "Best viewed at 800 x 600" from years ago (i.e. pointless).

Nice work though!

louie

Nice I like it.
Why is the "Add to cart" button so low on the page?
The logo should be link to the home page.

The color scheme is really nice.
Fair play to you.

randombar

Very very nice, colour scheme great! Not sure if I would have the view cart link in the bottom section links? Apart from that a very very nice looking site!

Webmonkey

Excellent Lads - that was just the feedback I was hoping for. Sometimes when you are developing these things may not be as obvious to you.

cgravey wrote:

The gradient on "High Powered..." in the logo makes the tag a bit hard to read

Yes that is certainly a problem I was thinking of, i'll sort this out soon enough.

cgravey wrote:

The image buttons on the Products page are hard to read (text is pixelated/compressed and small), and don't scale

That is true, they seem too pixelated - i'll work on a shaper text.

cgravey wrote:

The shade of green used in heading text, against the grey background is a bit hard to read. I think this is more just at the top of a page (because of the darker grey background gradient)

I guess that is correct alright, perhaps If i just increase the brightness of it a little bit more - I'll just change the H1 style - thank god for CSS

cgravey wrote:

On the individual product pages, the "Add to Cart" button isn't all that obvious. Take this page for example. Your "Add to Cart" uses the same icon style as the properties of the product and is down the page. I see 2 things wrong with that. First is that it's not at all obvious that Add to Cart is an action and Visible At Day is a property/metadata because of the similar icon use. Second is that the Add to Cart should be more prominent with, maybe, a second button at the end of the product textual description (that way people who know what the product is, and are just double checking, can click straight away, and people who read the description start-to-finish will be that tiny bit more tempted by the button at the end).

Now this is something I didnt notice - and is very true and it seems by the following posts too that it is a big problem. Will sort this out for definite.

I think the validator links look nice in a way - my opinion - Shows visitors that we went to the work of having valid xhtml.

louie wrote:

Why is the "Add to cart" button so low on the page?
The logo should be link to the home page.

Yep cart again - i'll sort this out for definite. As for the logo linking - that would certainly be a good idea. Cheers.

GaryCocs wrote:

Very very nice, colour scheme great! Not sure if I would have the view cart link in the bottom section links? Apart from that a very very nice looking site!

Another thing i was worrying about - the cart didn't seem too obvious, so I may put a cart icon on it as well and move it up to the top of the right column.

Thanks guys for the compliments as well - I was worried that the colour scheme would be dodgy to work with but it worked out in the end I think. I'm happy with it.

Cheers

louie

You have the cart at the very top which does stand out and gives you the right message, so when looking at a product You expect to see the button close to the top.

I would say best for it is just below the product name.

Product Name (green) doesn't really stand out on the page so a lighter color and bigger font size might sort that out, if not a tab background will do.

Also some anchor links to tabs below will help with the on-page navigation.

pres

I like it. The colour scheme is nice and slick! My only bad point would be that you should seriously consider changing the navigation bar to just simple text. It looks tacky. Maybe consider using a nice clean css nav, perhaps editting one of these: http://www.cssjuice.com/30-free-css-based-navigation-menus/ Other than that i like it! Fair play!

zardette

Hi there,

Oops! I just bought 1.5 laser pens ( showing a quantity of 1, but total price of 1.5x )
There are a number of data entry validation problems like that in this project. It looks great but you should get some help in validating this otherwise you might loose customer confidence?

hope you find this constructive,

Z

Webmonkey

zardette wrote: »

Hi there,

Oops! I just bought 1.5 laser pens ( showing a quantity of 1, but total price of 1.5x )
There are a number of data entry validation problems like that in this project. It looks great but you should get some help in validating this otherwise you might loose customer confidence?

hope you find this constructive,

Z

Hi guys thanks for the feedback.

Hmm thats odd, how you manage that? - Any chance you could give the exact steps you took - as I put a lot of time into data validation!

Thanks keep them coming guys.

Croc

There is defiantly something wrong with you cart, i selected a few items at random.

Look at the totals

zardette

Hi Webmonkey

I did some checking on the numeric entry fields

I tested for 0 and negative and you appear to have them covered.

However fractions are allowed but you cannot sell half a pen!

But there was even a more worrying error which seems to appear when you modify the quantity on the shopping cart.
For example If you type a quantity greater than 1 say 3 you get the total as only the vat

here is the result I get
Raptor 300 £ 509.79 £ 3058.72
Subtotal £ 3,058.72
Shipping
Vat Cost (17.5%) £ 535.28
Total Cost £ 538.28

that might not lose me as a customer but a a seller I would be nervous!

There are a few more issues with the email address validation and that error handling is left to the gateway which is not good as when you go back to your site you get a message as follows :

Oops! - Application Error: No Content Was Specified for the UIContent Object!

that as a customer that wants to buy a pen means nothing

Hope this is useful to you !

Z


z

Webmonkey

Yes lads these exactly the feed back I want. Thanks.

As for the fraction things - never thought of it - I hope a cast to (int) should do that.

I did go messing with the cart last night fixing rounding errors - I'm sure I messed it up there some where as I didn't have the wierd total errors before then.

As for the email address validation - I was aware of this - Have it on the current site but I just ignored this until I got everything else working first.

Cheers guys

Edit - Yes most definitely something gone wrong with cart with what ever changes I done lastnight! - Will definitely look into this.

Webmonkey

Ok found the problem, fixed the fraction and the wierd totallying.

Thanks once again

PixelTrawler

Black is a hard colour to pull off well - you've done a pretty good job

* Get rid of the wc3 links - its dated now
* You've no title / alt tags on your logo and shop images

Otherwise, good job!

Also

"The Demon outputs a highly visible, green laser beam which can be seen from incredible distances and will even burn objects." - nice, I want one:)