Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello everyone!

I just finished redoing my website. WWW.HEADSONPLATTERS.COM My first attempt was horrible, so I hunkered down and gave it a second go. I did it all myself and Im a complete amateur, but I have a very thick skin and gladly accept all critiques.

I am hoping to sell my products exclusively through my website. I am hoping that the content is interesting and funny, as well aesthetically pleasing.

I would like to what the SUN community thinks of it. Is it easy to navigate? User friendly?

Any other coments you might have are greatly appreciated too!

thank you!

-David

Here's the thing David, you're falling into the typical trappings of many design students and armatures. Overuse of effects. The most common misuse of effects tend to be gradients, bevels, shadows, and poor type selection.

You've got the shadows and the type selection here at 10, you need to turn the volume down to something that doesn't overpower your message.

Simple is better. Lose the shadows and borders, or at the very least tone it down. Use a more standard typeface for screen reading like Verdana or Tahoma, it's very hard to read right now.  Also, at first glance it looks like a one page site, your navigation is not in a prominent or intuitive place, it blends in with the heads. Put it at the top or the side where most sites have it. It's that way on most sites for a reason.

Hope this helps.

The font is hard to read especially since is it all small caps and very little paragraph breaks / space.

I agree your site navigation is not intuative. It is standard practice nad expected by users to see site navigation on every one of your web pages and tyypically in the same location on each web page. It is just user friendly to do so, other wise you're requiring viewers to go back to your home page to then click to go to another page.

Another issue is that you're using images (only) for your menu items. This (1) is not search engine friendly and (2) your image files are relatively large for such small items. It is better to you a text based menu, so that the links can be "read" by search engines.

Header images - again you're using image files for your headers (About us page, etc), you can use amn image background but "real" text for the words.

You should reconsider the file names for your web pages. For example: your "How to buy" web page file name is "How to Buy.html"  (with blank spaces). It is better NOT to have blank spaces in your file names, eventhough you can get away with it. Also, recognize that using a targeted keyword in your web page file name can help search results.

The other consideration is your use of PayPay only (PayPal buyme buttons) to handle selling online. A true ecommerce application allows you to maintain a customer database, product database, and provides other tools and features that can help sales, search results, etc.

 

~Roland

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Thank you so much for taking the time to look through the site and give me you inpuy gentleman. I think you both make excellent points.

I definatly going to change the navigation buttons and the text. The name of pages is an excellent point, I had no idea that the name would effect the search frendliness of it.

I used mostly images because i was having trouble with he text staying where I wanted it too when looked at in differnt browsers. I am a complete amateur, so im gonna have to learn how to do that better.

thanks again so much, it really does mean alot to me.

-David