Am I going in the right direction with redesign

[Ho Ho Bird]

I must be a glutton for punishment but instead of going to Church tomorrow I've chosen to put my site up for review.

You've helped me before but I've been following the forum and had a backlog of things I needed to do, so have bitten into to most of them now. So I'd really appreciate your thoughts on:

The home page: www.hohobird.com

A typical 'section page' http://www.hohobird.com/acatalog/New..._for_sale.html

and a typical product page http://www.hohobird.com/acatalog/Gra...anchester.html

In my defence 'my lord'

Basically the site was doing quite well (in a not very competative field) with the majority of my leads now coming from the site rather than the physical 'shop'. But those leads were coming from the product pages rather than the section pages or home page.

So, I've:
- Stripped out a few levels in the hierarchy (one was 6 deep!)
- Swapped an 'all image' home page for something more wordy, trying to incorporate a 'reason to buy from me' following Bamboo's advice. (goggle still shows the cached version to compare).
- Hopefully improve the layout of photos on the extended info page

I've still some stripping out to do on my keywords as I hadn't appreciated the keywords accumulated from every level in the hierarchy so some product pages look a bit spammy.

I'm still very surprised at my Google results. I often do much better than expected but other queries are hopeless.

Many thanks for your input and precious time. I'm using V8 and know no html so am stuck with manipulating a standard exec theme as best I can.

[parklifeclothes]

Looks wise, the design fits really well with what you are selling and although quite based on a standard theme looks very classy and it would intice me should I be looking to buy.

The larger images are as you say very large and take some time to load, whilst I would have thought your customers would not be bothered by this it may be worth thinking about using Normans (Drillpine) multi images tool, works fantasticly well and you can then have lots more detailed images without the size problems.

[NormanRouxel]

Much as I like supplying add-ons, I've a feeling that the careful use of Fragments with their additional images like you're using does a better job. You're selling expensive things and if I was buying something I'd almost certainly print out the page for reference. Your way means the customer see everything on the printout.

One tiny thing worth fixing when time permits is that the horizontal menu bar is just a bit too short for the Home, Search, etc buttons so they seem to stick out the bottom.

[gabrielcrowe]

No problem with the site, quite nice, other than this very creepy picture:

http://www.hohobird.com/acatalog/895_d1.jpg

I happen to have had nightmares, where enormous round-faced mechanical monsters crush beautiful British countryside towns.

[Goz]

Nicely balanced - plenty of info and white space.

My tuppence worth :

• The page titles are a bit wordy - lots of superfluous words - e.g. I'm not sure if "A top quality" is adding anything to the title of http://www.hohobird.com/acatalog/Hod...her_clock.html
• Try to get the logo as a link back to the home page.
• I would try and split the logo element of your header up. Have just the logo as a graphic and the rest as text.
• Alt tags on the photos need attention. You don't need "Picture of" at the beginning and many of the photos simply say "Please ask if you need this detailed photo"

It's all minor stuff really.

[Ho Ho Bird]

Thank you to all of you who have replied so far. Points duly noted and will be acted upon.