Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

We have finally went live with our store nysportsgear.com. I turn to the
experts for your advice.

What changes can or need to be done?

Thanks in advance!

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http://www.nysportsgear.com

Hi Howard :-)
I`m using FireFox 1.0 and a DSL line. The site loaded fast, but I`m also using a 1280 resolution on a 19" LCD panel. I`ve learned to increase the viewed font-size 1 time in order to get a more typical view.

When I did the Ctrl-+, the content at the top, in the "Hot Offers" frame was cut off by the colored bar (browse, featured items, and shopping cart). Have your developers test how the site looks at "normal" size, then larger and smaller.

In the "search box," when I clicked, I got only a cursor "insertion point." Instead, it should clear the words "enter keyword" and immediately allow me to type my keywords.

Under the Browse Products, to avoid the visual confusion of many acronyms, how about this. Set up navigation tabs by entire sports fields? So you could have, for instance, "Football," "Basketball," "Car Racing," and so on. Then, as sub-items, have the various abbreviations?

I`m thinking it`d give the viewer a chance to participate more. They could click on "Car Racing," then choose NASCAR, Indy 500, or other forms of auto racing. Just a thought.

I like the site, it`s easy to understand, and seemed to work well. I`m not a sports person, so I wouldn`t know much other than how the store looks and works. :-)

Thanks for that! The Hot Offers frame appears funny on some browsers and
its not a consistant error. I do need to fix that. I will look into your other
suggestions too.

Thanks again for the advice.

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http://www.nysportsgear.com

I agree with CraigL about the navigation reading Car Racing, Basketball and so on. I think this will assist in SEO too. Maybe you`ll catch people looking for gifts for sports minded people when the buyer may not be as knowledgeable about specific names and categories of sports within a main topic.

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Vincent Wilcox (a.k.a. KRAKR)
Drummer
My band: Letters Make Words

i guess it needs to be changed! 

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http://www.nysportsgear.com

Have you run this site through a validation process? Not being a developer, I don`t know the details, but reading many critiques where developers have stopped by, there`s apparently a way to do this. It examines the site and reports out any problems for a wide variety of browsers. Your developers should know about it, so you can ask them. ;-)

Everything looks good. I`m using a 19" LCD screen and a 1280 resolution as well.
I didn`t look at every page (although I couldn`t resist looking at the Denver Broncos products- I`m a big Broncos fan), but the only thing I found that you might want to check your image link for the following product: Joe Montana & Dwight Clark Signed 49ers The Catch 16x20 Photo, the image wasn`t there, it was just a white box.

As far as the validation process that CraigL was speaking of, you can go to the following website and see if your site is W3C compliant: http://validator.w3.org/.

Hope that helps. :)



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Moonlight Graphics
Your ultimate source for graphics and web design!

http://www.moonlightgraphics.us

Thanks for pointing that out Moonlight!

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http://www.nysportsgear.com

I think it looks pretty good.  If your target audience is sports fans, and I think it is, I don`t think the abbreviations are that big of a problem.  People who will search for "NBA" instead of "professional basketball" are more likely to be converted from shoppers to customers. 

The blog is a great idea, especially if you are looking for SEO juice, but it loaded pretty slow for me, might want to look into displaying less items on the homepage, should be a simple option.

I`m using Firefox and Mac OSX, and it looks good on my browser.

Only thing I might do is tweak the colors a little bit.  If you soften some of them up, and use that red or the orange from your `add to basket` to highlight your hot deals it might stand out a bit more.  But that`s an preference thing.


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Happy Human Foods
Simple. Healthy. Delicious.

You`re welcome. Glad to help. :)

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Moonlight Graphics
Your ultimate source for graphics and web design!

http://www.moonlightgraphics.us