Site review please

[mac-man]

Hi all

Could people please have a look at

http://www.nutrixpetfoods.co.uk

Just updated the look of the site. Could people give their honest opinions....

Thanks

BTW... we sell dog food.

Chris

[leehack]

Very dark and dreary, bit like an old gentleman's club. Wouldn't pet owners prefer bright, fresh, clean and modern, what's the wood panelling all about?

If the idea is retro dog food, i think you've achieved it, maybe the wood panelling is to look like a kennel, i feel it's like a website in the 60's would have looked, just looks dated i'm afraid to me.

Also posted in wrong forum (i'll move it).

[Mike Hughes]

I agree with Lee. It's a very old fashioned, retro look. To my mind the images look more 30's than 60's.

I would think the idea behind a website like this is to create some imagery that people will associate with the desired objective. This is why TV commercials for dog food are always full of healthy looking dogs, full of energy, happily bouncing around. (Except for the sad one's - my interpretation - that tell you need to give your dog the love and affection they show you by buying whatever brand it is).

I can see the imagery is a problem though. I was going to suggest happy dogs bouncing through fields of corn, but of course that's not so good for a grain free product. Maybe jumping through open moorland, splashing in ponds, running through the sea on a beach, etc.

Mike

[mac-man]

Thanks for the response so far. The aim was to give it an authentic natural feel. Maybe we've gone too far in that respect.

Just wondering whether to revamp the logotype as well.

Agree that the background looks too dark though... looks like I'll be busy this weekend. Main issue is that we updated the site on Monday and sales seem to be really slow this week.

Will be checking analytics to see if visitor numbers have changed. The design was a simple re-skin... none of the page names or image names have changed. So all the code is fundamentally the same, apart from changes to style sheets and any new images added.

[Mike Hughes]

I'm not sure what's changed on your website but the site is a bit heavy on graphics and the homepage is almost 500K Bytes so will be slow to load.

Total HTTP Requests: 98
Total Size: 497,933 Bytes

HTML: 13,205 KBytes
HTML Images: 33,735 Bytes
CSS Images: 264,308 Bytes
Total Images: 298,043 Bytes
Javascript: 84,055 Bytes
CSS: 102,630 Bytes

Thsi could affect your serps if the page has suddenly got much larger and slower to load.

What's with 100K bytes for CSS and 84K for javascript? Actinic's getting really bloated if this is standard.

Mike