Our first website - What can we improve on?
Submitted by freemanheng on Sun, 08/10/2008 - 06:40.
My wife and I just started our first website.
Everything except the blog is pretty much done. We even made a mobile version for mobile phone browsing.
Please help review the site and let us know what we need to improve on.
Thanks a million!
Francis
Website: www.strollerlife.com
I like the design, Francis. It's nice and clean.
How did you make the mobile version? Old schools techniques (tables for layout, font tags etc) and mobiles aren't usually very compatible.
One thing that could cause a problem is the underlined text. It's bad for usability to underline text that isn't a link.
This quote is from Jakob Nielson's Guidelines for Visualizing Links:
Don't underline any text that's not a link, even if your links aren't underlined. Reserve underlining for links. Because underlines provide a strong perceived affordance of clickability, users will be confused and disappointed if underlined text doesn't have an actual affordance to match this perception.
It is a clean, attractive design (XSitePro? I saw "XSP" style tags in the source), however there is definitely room for improvement:
1) There's wa-a-ay TOO much navigation on the page. For me, the repetitive links on the top, bottom and left are redundant and unnecessary.
Conversely, when I checked out your site in Lynx (text only browser) there was too LITTLE navigation! Are you serving all those navigation blocks in Javascript?? That will create issues for search engines trying to crawl and index your site. If you use javascript navigation you should at least include the most important plain links in "noscript" tags.
2) Too much empty space "above the fold" (on the top of the page) - not much up there to catch my attention.
3) Viewing your site as a visitor, I had a tough time finding a "buy" link or a "more info" link to the merchant site! Eventually I found them (agree with NickC that the underlined blue text was misleading), but it took me a while.. and I was *trying* to find them. Would a new visitor be that persistent?
4) Fix your breadcrumb navigation - there's a category repetition problem (i.e. home>home)
Good job for a first attempt though :) !
Hi NickC and JerseyGirl,
Thanks for the great tips. I am working on the changes.
JerseyGirl, you got me right on Xsitepro2. Now I know why when I do a page analysis, it keeps telling me I have more than 3 javascripts running and it is not advisable.
And NickC, the article is great. I am going to do a run through of the site and remove all the underlinings.
I will post it back once I am done with the changes again.
Thank so much.
I really appreciate it. It's great that there are people like you here who is so open and willing to help starters like me out.
Francis
I think those bright color blocks distract from the product pictures, the nice clean looking navigation, and the great logo.
Hi everyone,
I have finished doing the changes on our site and made more improvements based upon your suggestions.
JerseyGirl, your comment came right on time because Xsitepro just released an updated version of their software which includes noscript tags for all the dynamic scripts.
Fixed the breadcrumb navigation.
I've also added more visible buttons (ready to buy buttons) to allow visitors for easier navigation to link to the merchant site.
One other thing that I forgot to tell you is that I did a virtual siloing to the site.
So that's about it. Please review and advice.
Thanks.
Francis