Re: Commercial site request http://www.designersatwork.com

IE v5.5
1024 x 768
Dial-up connection
------------------

Charles,

A few things. I like the logo on the top left. Very
clean, good use of colors. 
All the pages loaded up fairly quickly on my end,
which is a 56k dial-up connection. The photos in your
furniture section took a bit more time, but that's to
be expected.
However, I question the use of a splash page. There's
no text, no mention of what I may find inside... just
a photo with a hover title of "Do come in!" And what
is the green line at the bottom? I sort of expected
some type of javascript text scroll to start up. I'm
glad it didn't, though, but I was just curious,
because it's not on your other pages. 
I think it would be better to put the "About Us" info
alongside your splash page's picture on the index
page.
After I clicked on the splash page, I wound up at the
"About Us" page, with only links of "Home" (where I
just came from), a "mailto:" email option, and the
preferable choice, the site map. But, the site map was
the second option, and sort of hid from my eye at
first.
It would be best to have all links available and out
in the open from the very beginning.
And the site map's main graphic: yeouch. A purplish
color scheme with scraggly arrows and scribbled text
saying "go here" "and here"? I saw the title was
"Hi-Tech Sitemap", which may be a sarcastic stab, but
this does not console me that you have a discerning
eye for design.
Your furniture is beautiful, but on the furniture
page, there are a few photos, and then a link saying
"more furniture". I think more people would find it
easier to navigate through your choices if they were
presented all on one page, either in a thumbnail
format or maybe a tree-style list.
One last thing- I don't think I caught what the
"DesignFinder" was supposed to mean. It looked to me
like your autobiography, which is cool, but I didn't
really understand the context of the title.
Hope some of this will be helpful.

Eric Hamiter

 

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