My website

[Tickle]

Hi everyone,

would you mind taking a quick look at my website and give me your feedback please?

The url is shown in my signature.

Thank you very much in advance for all your help.

John

[Duncan Rounding]

A nice looking site -I wish you well.

Just one quick thing that struck me - If it was me I'd tone down the red background used for the menu on the LHS to a much lighter shade - I think it's overpowering the products.

[parklifeclothes]

good site

Yep, nice site, agree with Duncan about the menu but the colour is the same as your name/logo so maybe can't be changed.
Love the product map, but feel it should possibly be carried thru every page in the same position as I would rather use that than the menu as its a nice funky feature. You have put loads of work into the site with the faq's page being full of useful info and the contact us page is superb (giving me some idea's, like the checkboxes)

Good luck,

Darron

[leehack]

I agree with Duncan on the red colouring, also on the hover state of links, it looks a little garey.

I can see what you are trying to achieve with the central map and IMO it almost works. When you first hit the site, as you move around with your mouse, the banner changes rapidly and you wonder wtf is going on. After a few moments, you begin to grasp the idea.

To use a map like that i think you should be doing two things to make it clear whats its there for and how it works:

1 - Remove all of the clutter around it, give it some space to breathe and define itself, i like the idea, it's just a little cluttered IMO.

2 - This will take some work, but be well worth it. As a user hovers over a particular room, make that room change, a rollover image would be a great idea, especially if it clearly highlights where the user is. A cleverly laid out table or floating left divs with rollover images for each area would be a great addition IMO.

The girl above the LH nav is very grainy, once again a nice idea, just the quality of the image letting it down.

On your contact form you have an image of your email address to stop the harvesters, yet you provide an email hyperlink, do one or the other.

The red underline when you hover on links looks more like a mistake than a design statement to my eyes.

A fair amount of wasted space on 1024 resolution, increase your site width a bit more, it will create shorter pages and give things some area to breathe. White space is your key!

Have a look at your title tags too, these could be much better for seo.

LH nav Children's? or Childrens? you have both.

A nice looking site, with a few tweaks and a bit more user friendliness (the map amendments are a must IMO) i think you will have a great site. Ive added it to my favourites anyway.

Good luck.

[fleetwood]

Echoing what has been said already - some nice ideas, but the effect on the front page is lost by being over cluttered.

The left hand side nav detracts from the central mapped image to such an extent, that I think it should go IMO. Maybe it could be replaced by text based links placed horizontally at the bottom of the page.

Whilst I would say that you would normally want and expect a text based side nav, in this situation it is in the way, and takes away too much from the central mapped room.
The room nav could then be made wider and clearer.
As Lee has said, a hover state on the current 'room' would help greatly.

Likewise, the picture navs below the mapped room area don't really work in their current state for several reasons:

The pictures all meld into one long strip - it is unclear where one starts and the next begins. The text underneath is out of alignment with the pictures.
I thought initially these were supposed to be links, but appear to just be a list

I would consider simplifying this element - having it clickable, and matching the text used here with that used below the pictures surrounding the room nav. At the moment, there are at least 4 different fonts within the navigation areas, which is a little off-putting.

Moving down from the room navs has a disconcerting effect - if you move downwards slowly, the secondary nav pictures below this area turn into 'click a room to start shopping' - whilst if you move downwards quickly, you are over the secondary nav pictures (which aren't really secondary nav links at all, which I found confusing).

It may be better just having the 'click a room to start shopping' showing, instead of the secondary nav pics, unless you can make the secondary navs into a working nav bar.

Finally, the 'New Products' list would look a lot better in the same style as, and underneath the 'Best Sellers'.
As it is, it makes the side bar longer than the main area, which makes the page look unfinished IMO.

All in all a good site, which could be made great with a little bit of decluttering and rearranging.

Good luck (you have at least 2 dad-to-be's checking your site, so your off to a good start )

[leehack]

Good luck (you have at least 2 dad-to-be's checking your site, so your off to a good start )

My God Martin we agreed on something - woohoo! We must be getting close to fatherhood.

Adding to Martin's point about the banner under the map, i would also recommend getting rid of it. Create a nice clean map with hover states, that banner adds confusing and does nothing positive. Use those KB to get a great map going, cos the idea is great, just the application that is slightly off.

[fleetwood]

My God Martin we agreed on something

Its meeting like this in the twilight zone that does it Lee - I'm up after about 6 hours disjointed sleep, and your probably just about to get off to bed.

Two half-asleep zombies, babbling away....

[leehack]

Its meeting like this in the twilight zone that does it Lee - I'm up after about 6 hours disjointed sleep, and your probably just about to get off to bed.

Two half-asleep zombies, babbling away....

LOLOLOLOL, well you got me sussed correctly, i'm due some kip soon, next hour will decide whether i need to sleep or not, i'm certainly flagging.

Never start something big at 4am in the morning - you think i'd learn, but nope.

[completerookie]

one other thing, move the javascript out to a seperate file, you'e included it into every page, thus increasing the downloads etc
probably the same with any styling.

if its a live-site, consider compacting the html, again saving on download (speed and costs)

[george]

Hmmmm.

Not sure if I like the house layout actually, my first scroll over was then an attempted click on one of the new images below, which obviously didn't happen. I'd get rid of the changing images along the bottom unless you are going to make them some sort of menu to access sub sections.

Also too many colours for me. Red down the side with green, then light blue buttons with another shade of green for the checkout button, aqua for the house plan. Reversing the nav box colours might actually make it look a lot better (red/green links on a white box).

I think the logo lacks a small child beside it, or even a hand drawn baby or something. But hey, thats just me. And I certainly ain't the Logo King on here.

Having fertilised three teenagers I don't need to add you to my favourites. Well, not unless you do shotguns, an unlimited fund cashline card, two taxis, oops, cars that run on water and a skybox remote that overrules the regular one. Oh, and a secret cupboard for our kitchen that keeps (my favourite) foods longer than two hours.

PS I know it was a lot of work, but I think I'd ditch the house plan bar for possibly the homepage. *puts on hard hat*

[Tickle]

Wow, fantastic feedback and great observations - thanks.

It makes you realise how easy it is to lose objectivity. I'd like to reply to some of the feedback to see what you think.

Thanks for the positive comments. The map proved to be quite a task. I used a 3d home design package to create an imaginary house and then used that to create this 3d plan view of the rooms.

1. I think you're right on the LH Nav colour being too intense. It was designed to match the logo colour but I think it does need changing to something much easier on the eye or... (see point 2)

2. Removing the LH Nav is an option and would be great for the extra space but I'm not sure I could successfully have the map on all pages where I want to show products. I've got it as a small clickable icon on all pages to jump back to. It could work on the from page alone.

My thoughts were that I wanted to keep the LH nav for SEO purposes, to make it easier to have additional sections, and to provide an alternative to those who don't like the map approach.

3. Clutter - I can see what you mean. I originally tried the page with just the map and it seemed far too bland and serious and I wanted to create a more fun theme showing happy children, etc. I need to rethink how to achieve this as the extra space would improve the look and reduce confusion.

4. Rollover map. Yes, that's a great idea and something that did cross my mind. I'm very new to Actinic and knew nothing of html 6 months ago so it's been a steep learning curve. I have managed rollovers on buttons using CSS but what you're suggesting, Lee, sounds pretty tricky. I think it's an excellent idea though and I'm going to look at trying it out. My initial thoughts are like turning a light on so that the room is lit and the other rooms go dark. Or maybe zooming the room forward but I think that would be a substantial amount of work.

5. The changing image area. The idea for this was to provide a visual summary of the type of products in each room as you move the mouse over the map. Having the map alone on the front page doesn't seem very inviting without the visual clues.

The idea is that it reverts back to "click on a room..." when you leave the map space and it wasn't meant to be clickable. This was done because if you're on a room like kitchen you can't get to this image area without crossing other rooms so the image would change before you reached the "click on a room..." image. Even if I designed the map so you could it would require careful mouse control to avoid it flipping to another rooms contents.

The problem I have is that if you move the mouse quickly enough the software is too slow to notice and leaves the image on the last room. I think I need to increase the size of the external zone to reduce this happening.

I'm not convinced that it's a feature that should be removed but maybe it can be improved. Probably moving it further from the map would help to some extent. It might be worth changing or removing the text below the images on this as well.

6. I thought I'd get more comments on the best sellers format. It's not very attractive and I've not added any pictures to save KB. I've increased the amount of text as well. The idea was that it was below the field of view and would be great for SEO. I saw it as a trade off - is it worth doing for SEO?

7. I need to look into how to move the javascript out of the pages. Some stuff has to be there I think like the Analytics at the bottom of the page. I'm a total novice in this area so I need to find out how to do this. Same thing with the styling.

8. I use the compact option in Actinic but haven't done anything more advanced than that. When I looked into compacting it seemed that you needed something on the server to decompact it before it went out. I also thought it was disliked by bots, etc. Any advice?

George - ditch the house plan! Sobs.

Any other comments that don't include ditching the whole house plan gratefully received.

Thanks

John

[george]

George - ditch the house plan! Sobs.

Any other comments that don't include ditching the whole house plan gratefully received.

Relax, one bad egg in the basket ain't too bad fella.

I'd like to see what the Community Girls (Jan from Mole End, and Jo from Pinbrook, etc) have to say, from a girl/woman/mums point of view. So hopefully one or two of them will visit this thread soon.

[Tickle]

It's ok George . It's good of people to spare their time to offer feedback.

Other than the clutter (and colours), it looks like the bottom image idea has created the most negative response.

If my explanation above makes sense then you'll see why it can't really be clickable. It's supposed to be a window into what products are in the room. The idea is that the customer clicks on the room on the map rather than the image.

I can't imagine how the room map function and this image could functionally work together. As you move over the rooms the product image area changes, it would be like a dog chasing it's owen tail.

I think the only reason it looks like it shouild work clickable is because it's too close to the map and it sometimes freezes on an image if the mouse movement is quick. I think I can solve both those issues.

I still think the concept of showing the summary of products in each is a good idea.

[jont]

For a fantastic, clean implementation of the house map concept see Nick's site www.theperfectpad.co.uk

[acompton]

Having fertilised three teenagers

Should we be telling social services?

Well, not unless you do shotguns, an unlimited fund cashline card, two taxis, oops, cars that run on water and a skybox remote that overrules the regular one. Oh, and a secret cupboard for our kitchen that keeps (my favourite) foods longer than two hours. *

I recognise all these problems. Plus you can include a sound system that confines its output to one room.

Back to the original thread:
The colours look ok to me (on a CRT) I find colours are more garish on an LCD.
I think the house plan is a good idea - just needs improving and making it more obvious how-to-use.

Alan