Website Critique

[Trev Mac]

Hi guys, (and gals) as Jimmy Saville used to say.

Would it be possible to get some feedback from you regarding the design and functionality of the following site:

Digital Canvas Prints

Never been involved with e-commerce before so all comments would be welcome regardless of how brutal they may be.

Cheers,

Trev

[RuralWeb]

Hmmmm - took me a while to work it out. At the end you ask for the customer to email you with the file name - would it not be better to add an other info box at the product level for them to enter it there. It will then be shown on the invoice and you will have all the deatils together. Asking them to email the file name is IMO just asking for problems

[leehack]

Don't have images as your headings, they contain your keywords and should be text on the site.

[Trev Mac]

Hi Malcolm / Leehack,

Thanks for the replies.

Malcolm. When you say it took you a while to work it out, do you mean the actual theme of the website? ie what it is that we are selling.

Leehack.
I have alt tags for each of these images. Will that not allow the search engines to see the content or would it definately be better to have them as text?

Again thanks for your replies.

[leehack]

Hi Trev

The alt attribute is for screen readers and for people who do not download images etc. it did have a little weight on the SEO side, but it was abused per usual so it means very little nowadays. You cannot beat content on a site and content is text, so yes you are best to use text in all cases, unless you want to get really clever and start using flash replacement techniques, but that is quite advanced. Keep it simple and do all things that can be text as text, nothing else.

[Trev Mac]

Cheers for that Lee.

Good constructive feedback.

Appreciate it.

[Trev Mac]

would it not be better to add an other info box at the product level for them to enter it there. It will then be shown on the invoice and you will have all the deatils together. Asking them to email the file name is IMO just asking for problems

Hi Malcolm,

I think you are making a good point here. I will look into incorporating an additional info box.

Thanks.

[leehack]

Pleasure Trev, make sure you look into, or use (if you already know) correct heading tags <h1>, <h2> etc. for these areas, that tells the search engines the content and theme on the pages. Most of what i saw on the page looked like separate fragments, so make sure you use the correct layouts and that those layouts have the correct structure. Your website and its pages start to get laid out like a book is with chapters, titles, headings, sub headings etc.

This is one area where actinic is quite poor IMO, typical example on a product page:

Section title is a <h1>
Product name is a <h3>
Product price is also a <h3>

That's gotta be the most glaring mistake you can see.

Fragments too, if you use the headline fragment twice on a page, you have put two <h1> tags, i've never seen a book with two main titles on a page.

You need to take full control of your site structure in these areas as standard actinic is naff IMO.

[NormanRouxel]

I have a File Upload add-on that would allow the customer to upload an image at the Product level. The Add to Cart is disabled until an image has been uploaded. The image is saved on the server and the filename is attached to the order-line and passed to the printed reports.

Contact me if interested.

[RuralWeb]

File Upload add-on

Certainly a better option - I forgot about you there Norm!