Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

If you have any critiques on the site please feel free to post. Thanks!

Grant 

 

Site: www.autooptic.com

 

Hi Grant :-)
I took a look (Firefox 1.x, Windows PC). Since I`m not in the after market and have no clue what HID means, I had no real interest in the site.

On a generic level, though, I suspect that the small white font on the black background is going to be hard on anyone`s eyes.

If you subscribe to the view that a Web page should be mostly scannable, in that most people only scan through a page in 4 seconds, this page isn`t scannable. So I would assume you don`t subscribe to that view. There are quite a number of learned articles demonstrating this principle, but perhaps in the HID field it`s not true.

Overall the page looks quite nice. I like the black background and gold lettering. It looks cool, high-tech, and professional. What I`d probably do is set the text areas to a much lighter background and use black typeface. You could use table cell background images to have a sort of textured "paper" look for the cells, then put your content over that.

Beyond that, I can`t say much as I don`t understand the product.

I remember this site posted before for a critique.  And I remember looking at it fairly extensively.  I gave a pretty detailed critique about the visual aspects of the site (find it on the second page of the thread).  I see you got rid of the serif font and changed the words "shipping box".  And hey, I don`t expect that you would do all of what I or anybody suggests.  I mean, anyone would do the same project differently.  But I really really think you need to do something about that grid pattern!  I even made a suggestion about how to keep it by altering it some.


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Steve Lowtwa

Steve - the poster here is the site owner, not the site developer (as in the original thread). Just as an FYI ...

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I`d get away from having the scrolling frames for text (main text block and navigation on the right).

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chuck fuller

Okay got it, thanks Nikole.

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Steve Lowtwa

Hello Craig,

Thanks for the input, but i don`t under stand what you mean by if the page is scannable? can you explain it little more?

Thanks!

Grant

Hello Steve,

Thanks for the suggestion, haha most likely the grid pattern will be gone on the next udpate.

for chuck - why is the scrolling frame not good for the site?

n thanks Nikole for following up

 

Grant  

Scannable to the human eye.....like speed reading. A site has about 4 seconds to get a viewer interested, because the overwhelming majority of Web-viewing public "scan" a page as fast as they do when channel-surfing on TV.

That means grabber headlines, limited text on the front page, and a way to get your product and message across instantly.

Grant, there are many things I like about your site, and just a couple aesthetic things I might consider changing in the update.

What I like:
*the color scheme makes the site look high tech (like CraigL mentioned)
*the layout - I think it is simple, and easy to navigate around
*the content overall sounds professional and I get the impression that you really know what you`re talking about
*the HID 101 page - I found it helpful since before looking at your site, I had no idea what HID was/meant

What I might consider changing:
*the scroll box on the home page at the top - this format is not very readable or scannable
*the grid background - I find it somewhat distracting
*if possible, I might make the font a uniform size... the top boxes on each part of your site have a smaller font, which makes it harder to read

Hope this helps, and overall, very nice!