New Website Feedback required please

mwarner

Junior Member
Hi,

The website that I have been working on was launched a few months ago, ongoing changes are being made to the site on a regular basis.

If I could just have your opinions on the website and perhaps the content, the site as a whole I would really appreciate it.

http://www.advink.co.uk

Thanks in advance

Mark
 
It turns out that the servers were being switched last night and that was the cause of this post and one or two others being deleted!

---------- General Observations

Now... on to the site. I must say, for someone who has just graduated (and therefore presumably been taught the latest and greatest in web design) the site looks pretty dated. Every instance of drop shadow is over-done, they should be subtle and elegant. Look at shadows in real life, you'll notice that they are much lighter.

The design feels quite cramped, everything just needs a little bit more (white) space to breathe. For example if you look at the process bar, you'll notice that the cmyk (which reads more like kycm) box is actually touching the top border of the bar.

Another glaring issue is that you've used Geosans Light as a web font, this is problematic because thin fonts don't display very well in browsers. For me, for example, the f's and t's are missing the horizontal bar. You'll notice that a lot of the curves i.e. the top of an S, e or o won't display very smoothly either. Good for graphic design and big font sizes but not for small web font.

The multi-coloured theme you've gone for with a different primary colour on each page is a difficult one to get right. At the very least I think you need to use less saturated colours. The category boxes you've used on sub pages i.e. Travel/Ceramic/Plastic Mugs don't look too great, mainly because the site is quite inconsistent in design. For example you've got sharp corners, slightly rounded corners and then you've got fully rounded corners.

---------- Primary Pages

The 'Company', 'About Us' and 'Testimonials' section is currently too dominant. It's detracting from the presence of the main content above. It's currently given an almost equal amount of importance when in reality it's a sub element which needs to be much smaller and of less contrast on the page than the main content.

I feel that the 'Check These Out' and 'Top Trends' need to be displayed in a much more customer friendly way. The general rule of thumb is that the more text you have in any one area, the less likely people are to read the information. Think about throwing some images in there.

---------- Products and Product Pages

The products, as displayed with "From £x.xx each", feel a little cramped too. With these type of sites, which are on the more difficult end of the spectrum, you need to be able to display as many products as possible in the least amount of space possible. You could get away with each image being quite a bit smaller.

If you look at any of the national retail sites that are set up in a similar way you'll notice that they all allow the user to know the important information about the product without having to click on the item itself, because it's quite a hassle to have to open a new page to look at one product if you're in browse mode where you only want to get the basic information of a product, not know it's life history. Essentially you're forcing someone to have one tab for every item they want to look at or compare in some way which isn't a very good form of navigation. It may be outside the scope of the project and/or the budget but you should try and get some javascript interactivity going on there. A popular method is upon hovering the box enlarges and displays additional information or allows for more interactivity in some way, even if it's only to enlarge the image.

The 'Other Recommendations' slider scrolls too quickly, the arrows look too bulky and a out-dated and I reckon it would be a lot better if you made that into a full width feature instead of just limiting it to such a small area. Take a look at Amazon and the space they dedicate to similar products. Also when I scroll to the bottom of the page, 1px is covered in white at the bottom of the Other Recommendations text. I imagine it's something to do with the padding/margin of the images beneath. (Firefox 15.0.1/Win 7)

--------- Conclusion

I think it's a good start, especially if this is your first project. However, there is a fair amount of tweaking to be done!

It's nice to see someone asking for a review on a website that they haven't made with Word Press for once, so thanks for that! How did you go about building the site and do you see yourself specialising in design or development? What languages and codes do you know already and do you plan to learn any more in the future?
 
To be fair, it's probably the best website I've ever seen, that's been designed with MS Paint ;)

Mspaint-darwine.png
 
Heeey.. That's pretty good man, ever considered becoming a graphic designer? :p

Apologies if the OP comes back, but I don't think this is going to be the case, considering we were talking over PM about his site after my original review was deleted, he seemed to be quite active. It's a little odd when people ask for a review, you give one, and then they disappear! Charming.

I'm starting to see why people don't give many reviews to new members...
 
To be fair, it's probably the best website I've ever seen, that's been designed with MS Paint ;)

It hasn't been design with MS Paint, but I'd appreciate if you could explain what you mean by this?


Apologies if the OP comes back, but I don't think this is going to be the case, considering we were talking over PM about his site after my original review was deleted, he seemed to be quite active. It's a little odd when people ask for a review, you give one, and then they disappear! Charming.

I'm starting to see why people don't give many reviews to new members...

I've haven't been back on the forum since it was reposted.

---------- General Observations

Now... on to the site. I must say, for someone who has just graduated (and therefore presumably been taught the latest and greatest in web design) the site looks pretty dated. Every instance of drop shadow is over-done, they should be subtle and elegant. Look at shadows in real life, you'll notice that they are much lighter.

The design feels quite cramped, everything just needs a little bit more (white) space to breathe. For example if you look at the process bar, you'll notice that the cmyk (which reads more like kycm) box is actually touching the top border of the bar.

Another glaring issue is that you've used Geosans Light as a web font, this is problematic because thin fonts don't display very well in browsers. For me, for example, the f's and t's are missing the horizontal bar. You'll notice that a lot of the curves i.e. the top of an S, e or o won't display very smoothly either. Good for graphic design and big font sizes but not for small web font.

The multi-coloured theme you've gone for with a different primary colour on each page is a difficult one to get right. At the very least I think you need to use less saturated colours. The category boxes you've used on sub pages i.e. Travel/Ceramic/Plastic Mugs don't look too great, mainly because the site is quite inconsistent in design. For example you've got sharp corners, slightly rounded corners and then you've got fully rounded corners.

Thanks for the time it has taken you to look through the website and write such a detailed responce. I have taken this on board and spoken to Advink to see what their ideas and thoughts are on the issues you have brought up.

I have just finished an interactive design course and over the 3 years we only covered 3 web units, 1 per year.

Year 1

http://www.markstephenwarner.co.uk/ilikeyourface/index.html
http://www.markstephenwarner.co.uk/ilikeyourface/home.html

Year 2

http://markstephenwarner.co.uk/FruitVeg/

Year 3

http://www.markstephenwarner.co.uk/Omnia/
http://www.markstephenwarner.co.uk/Omnia/homepage.html
http://www.markstephenwarner.co.uk/Omnia/profile.html

Unfortunately I don't think the course prepared me and my fellow students for the real web and graphic design industry. We certainly wasn't taught the latest and greatest in web design.

Sorry for the delay in reply which may effect what and how people think of me on this forum.

Mark
 
No problem, glad I could help. No one will think any less of you! Don't worry about that at all, we are all busy at times and can't always spend time hanging around the forums :)

It would appear that you weren't prepared enough, however, it's certainly not the end of the world, especially if you wrote this site by hand. You didn't answer my questions on how the site was built or what technical skills you have, It'd still be great to know.

I'd love to know how the feedback went down with them, if they see it differently (you'd be surprised..!) at all. Hope it's all going well :)
 
It would appear that you weren't prepared enough, however, it's certainly not the end of the world, especially if you wrote this site by hand. You didn't answer my questions on how the site was built or what technical skills you have, It'd still be great to know.

I'd love to know how the feedback went down with them, if they see it differently (you'd be surprised..!) at all. Hope it's all going well :)

Well as you can see from the threee websites that I have actually built during my university time, we have only done html and css. We have touched a little bit in Javascript and JQuery.

The feedback went quite well, it's good to get someone else's opinion on the website, an outsider, if you will, to give a fair opinion of what they think of the website. Some of the points you mentioned have been worked on and others, due to my lack of knowledge and their lack of funds, aren't able to be put in to place just yet.

Mark
 
No problem, glad I could help. No one will think any less of you! Don't worry about that at all, we are all busy at times and can't always spend time hanging around the forums :)

It would appear that you weren't prepared enough, however, it's certainly not the end of the world, especially if you wrote this site by hand. You didn't answer my questions on how the site was built or what technical skills you have, It'd still be great to know.

I'd love to know how the feedback went down with them, if they see it differently (you'd be surprised..!) at all. Hope it's all going well :)

The feedback you've given on that website is immense! Input like that makes this site work so well. I'm a member of an American design website and feedback of any use is few and far between, people love criticising and then quickly jumping on the users back when they question it.

... apologies for going off topic.
 
Thanks :) I don't know what to say, haha, I just like to help.

Maybe you should give that other forum up and bring some friends over and we can all hang out here instead ;)
 
Back
Top