Re: Critique of WoodBeArt.com

Congratulations on getting the website up and working. It is obvious that
you have worked hard to get the site this far, and it's even better that you
are still willing to look for improvements.

I looked at you site in NN 4.75, IE 5.5, and Opera 5.02, (win98 & Ethernet)
and at several resolutions; your pages loaded fine for me. However, if
viewing the page at 640x480 is important to you in this case, you might want
to make some adjustments there.

The overall appearance, imho, is a bit flat, and doing something different
with the background may be one part of a solution. Perhaps the image you
specified for a background isn't showing up the way you intended. Using drop
shadows may be another approach, as well as incorporating hr's, or columns
or more images/icons. But remember, if you do change the background, to keep
the font a legible color too.
(I know that calling something "flat" is a bit nebulous.
http://www.onsitedesigns.net/ is a similar product type page that, by
comparison, is not as "flat".)

The site categories (products, customize, order, etc.) are nice and clear,
but the blue cursive font on the wavy wood background is a little hard to
read. Since these are mouseover images, you can easily include some more
effects here as well.

I suppose you know that your "Shipping Info" & "Site Map" links aren't
working. Those are the two categories that I specifically wanted to find.
Where is this company located anyway? Many customers are much more
comfortable making purchases from someplace where they know the address,
phone number, & other credentials. This information could be on the Shipping
Info page, but having it on the About page would also make a lot of sense.

The Home page contains some JavaScript to place images of the days of the
week text into an array, but I can't see the purpose of this. In fact, there
is a lot of unnecessary code that was automatically inserted into the pages,
and removing the stuff that's not needed will not only help the page load
quicker, it will make the code easier to work with overall.

On some of the top-level pages the text is size 4 and aligned in the center,
while elsewhere it is size 3 and aligned left.

The page for the nameplates contains the most products and is the one most
unlike the others. Since it requires the additional navigation it doesn't
fit into the same layout pattern as the others without some creative
consideration. Since the sub-category links are similar in font and color to
the main category links it is easy to tell that they are links for
navigation; which is good. But since they are the same size as the other
links and are in the same top of page location, they are not easily
identified as sub-categories; not so good. Maybe you would want to try
adding some subtle changes to set these links apart from the rest.
Also, the table cell that contains the "Clocks" link has a bunch of
non-breaking spaces in it causing the image to be out of alignment with the
rest of the images.
The link to "View Cart" is placed differently on this page as well.

You won't have to worry about your lack of experience for too long. I'm sure
you've learned a lot from doing this site already. Part of the learning
comes from reading and hearing, part comes form watching others (view
source), and a big part comes from doing. Remember, there will always be
people around who can criticize you're work and point out flaws that they
might see, just as there are those who will only tell you that everything is
always perfect. Neither is always what you really want to hear. I hope my
opinions have not discouraged you in any way, and I hope you find something
in them you can use.

Best wishes,

--
Dennis K



----- Original Message -----
> www.woodbeart.com was my project. ...
> ... I need some professional opinion on this site if I am to improve.
> Let me know any feedback you feel would be helpful, navigation, layout,
> colors, load times, etc

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