Re: critique request for business site

<snip>I'm designing a website for my parents' business & I'd
appreciate any critiques. Thanks!http://www.sweets-n-briar.com/shopdemo
<snip>

Hi Matt:

IE 4.72
58K
640X480res

Nice beginning! First the good stuff:

Your online store is great.  Nice logical setup.  Easy to navigate and good
clean look.  Very nice that the purchaser's total is automatically figured.
Nice.  My only suggestion for the store section is that you might want to
add an option to print out the form to fax or mail with a check for buyers
who don't want to send credit card info on an unsecure site.

Now for my humble suggestions.

Your home page: it works; it's clean but lacks creative spark.  How about a
clever graphic--I dunno--somebody smoking a cigar?  Your color scheme I
personally would not have chosen but it is definitely tobacco-y so it works.
I would definitely choose a snazzier looking button to enter the online
store rather than the plain grey button.  Speaking of buttons, I would snazz
up your sidebar buttons too...give them some dimension.

Your logo is a good beginning but also needs some tweaking.  (BTW, this is a
graphic artist/logo designer speaking so I'm very picky about this sort of
thing.)  For the logo I would suggest a solid color for the NH outline
instead of the stone texture (it doesn't match the rest of the page).  I
think a shiney, metallic looking surface for the NH outline would look great
and maybe a star where your store is located.  The leaf would look better
with some dimension to it and maybe a shiney look too.

Cigar page: Right now the page looks off-balance, I would center the text or
place the text in a table and put one of the pics up at the top beside the
text.  The pics would look better broken up with one at the top so the
viewer sees a pic immediately instead of just text.  Right now I have to
scroll right to see the last pic.

History page: Begging for graphics.

Map: Neat.  The clickable idea is great but when I click on the map the link
is not working.

Besides all that, your site serves its purpose well.  Everything loaded fast
at 58K and the site is very easy to navigate.

HTH,
Blue Tapp
Blue's ArtHouse
blue(at)bluesarthouse.com
www.bluesarthouse.com
over a decade of professional computer graphics
website development, internet hosting, marketing and research

HTML: hwg-critique mailing list archives, maintained by Webmaster @ IWA