Site comments please

[Matt Kitchen]

Hi

Having spent many an hour adjusting our site, I would appreciate any constructive comments on our site.

www.welovelanguages.co.uk/acatalog/index.html

You'll perhaps notice it is part of a larger site, so I've tried to match it all up - reasonably successfully. Now I feel a little like I can't see the wood for the trees, so I would hope you can provide a few pointers.

Incidentally I've only been working with Actinic for 2 months (since my web designer could only produce this www.thelanguagebookshop.co.uk - how much would you all pay??). This forum has & is an invaluble resource so thank you to all the experts on here who help along novices like myself.

[jont]

Hi Matt,

have to say your site is far better than the second (paid for) site.

On the navigation I was expecting may be a flyout menu due to the small arrow but nothing happens ... the button is also not clickable just the text. Having text links is brilliant but can fool some users who are not quite as dextrous with their mouse pointing. As the button is a cell/table background I would be inclined to introduce a transparent GIF to accomodate the rest of the space to the right of the text and make that a link - so people can click what they think is the button and get through to the relevent sections.

Some of the products could do with having a larger image available as a pop up - A2 posters for example are very difficult to discern at thumbnail size

As for paying for the original site I could not see any impovement much beyond the basic themes available with Actinic unless they had to manualy input all the info which is very labour intensive. Probably best to tell us how much you paid rather than for us to guess just in case the designer is a member of this forum!

[wjcampbe]

I'm sorry, but the first thing I would do is convert all the jpg files to gif (including the UK map on the about us - where are we page). The pages took a long time to load on my 512k ADSL line. Looking past the load time issue, the site appears clean and functional, and I like your implementation of the left side menu. You have done very well in two short months.

BTW the link to the designer site was not functional, I had to add the acatalog/index.html to the url before anything loaded.

[compendia]

I agree about being able to click on the arrows, thats what I would expect. i love your colour scheme, especially the stone colour you've used on the background, can I ask which layout or theme you used?

I like your graphics as thumbnails for section as well.

Up on the right hand side there is menu with two lines of differently formatted text link. I wonder why.

On the about us page you simply have a list of contacts but having a look at your website it seems that you do a lot of things as well as sell products, I would have thought this page would the perfect opportunity to explain all about the different services from the company.

[Matt Kitchen]

Thanks for the comments folks - all very useful.

I will definately look at the menu bar issue & I think the poster pop up is a good idea too.

I have broadband & it is easy to overlook the impact of large graphics files as they download so quickly. I like my maps & the pages are informative. People have little idea of the attractions of the East Midlands - just old coal mines!!

The layout used in Actinic is the clean layout 14. I have done some tinkering to match everthing up & I do find it much faster to upload than some of the other themes Actinic has. The none actinic part of the site was laid out by a friend who came to the rescue after our web designer problems.

The idea of the top menu is to put across who & where we are. The menu below this for what we do. Hopefully people can get the info they need from the pages within those sections. We wil be adding sections to this later in the year, so two rows are probably neccessary.

The original designer quoted about £5000 for the whole site last August & was given the job in September. All he has achieved is a company design, implementation of a CMS (Mambo) & thelanguagebookshop "shambles". I even provided all the content & images!!

To say I'm annoyed is an understatement but we are working to recover some losses. I don't believe he comes on here, as he doesn't appear to know his **** from his elbow never mind Actinic!!

Thanks again for the comments
Matt

[jont]

The original designer quoted about £5000 for the whole site

Ouch

[Matt Kitchen]

To be honest Jont, we never paid anywhere near that for the website, although we have purchased some hardware & software which have been unsatisfactory too.

We will be attempting to return the whole lot!!

The web work has cost us appprox. £1000, but that is still to much even if it does include the purchase of Actinic (V6 I might add - some tale about it being easier to SEO site with this)