Hi Mick,

>	in between the flaming re PSP v Photoshop does any one have time to
visit
>www.yorkshire-books.co.uk and offer a critique?

Home page:

Overall it looks nice and neat. The first thing I noticed is the the logo
appears distorted and I thought you had resized it using the IMG
height/width. I would try to get a cleaner version of that. I like the
little sketch in the top left corner, and it did remind me of Yorkshire (I
visited there in '93) and gives a nice olde worlde feel.

The blue of the body copy doesn't tie in with the earthy colours used
elsewhere and I would try something else - the green right at the bottom
might work. Oh yes, don't use colour names in your body tag - not all the
browsers recognise them.

You have "the Yorkshire Bookshop" in bold - I would also make Fallon's in
bold to tie them together more strongly. Since most people coming to site
won't want to read the description more than once, I would put something
else between "welcome to..." and "we stock..." - book of the week,
perhaps, but something that changes regularly (take a hint from Amazon on
this one).

The contact details and below are in a different font than the rest - I
would change that. I like the way you have worked the links into the copy
instead of using that abominable click-here. I like the button colours but
that font is very over-used - perhaps look for something different (but
still legible) on one of the many free-font sites. I like the way you've
positioned the mailing list, but leave a space between the radio buttons
and the adjoining text.

There seem to be some spacing problems with Opera, the buttons are very
far apart and there's a huge gap between "Enter your E-mail address here"
and the form field. I think it's because you've used a table, which is
quite unnecessary for what you're doing - just makes the html file larger
and more difficult to maintain/debug. Instead of putting your buttons into
a separate table,  with each button in a separate cell, rather just
separate the buttons with <p> and you'll get the same effect with much
less effort.

Other pages:

I didn't really have time to look at these properly, but they seem to be
inconsistent. Eg Orders follows the same layout as the home page (good)
but Reviews is totally different (bad). I can see why you might want to
brighten up the Kids section, but don't deviate from the format without
thinking about it carefully first - people get used to finding the
navigation on the lhs for example, and don't want to have to suddenly
scroll all the way to the bottom to find it.

On the Contact Us page, "Your E-mail address" displays in two different
fonts.

I hope this isn't too difficult to follow, usually I use bullet points,
but it's early *yawn* :)

>I would be especially interested in Browser, operating system and
>resolution used to view the site.

Todays's browsers are Opera 3.50 and IE5 [NT4, 1152x864 (but the actual
browser windows are smaller)].

HTH

Lynnsey


l y n n s e y   s k l i r o s
                      m o b i l e   t e l e p h o n e   n e t w o r k s

O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet
will make Gods by the dozen! -- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

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