Website Critique?

Nice work. One thing I noticed that's not related to the design... 1Shot1KillDesigns. I dont know if I would want that "name" on my site if I was a business buying a site from you. You should probably come up with a dba that sounds a bit more professional. That's it, everthing else looks good.
 
Thanks for the review, that was my old design company, I had it in mind to change that back over to just my name.

Thanks though!

Edit: Fixed. ;)
 
You really should proofread the site.

Family owned and operated for over 50 years, my father, Joe, started back in 1950 as a full sporting goods business, then saw a need for a specialty ski shop which is what it has now become now.
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That's really awkward. Your father Joe was family owned an operated for fifty years? Even after that, it's a confused run-on sentence. The rest of the paragraph needs help, too. The balance of the page is okay, but still deserves a re-write.

The font you use in the menus and header clashes with the font in the body of the page.

Is Mark the father, or is he "I", or is he the son? The page confuses me.

Send us your BEST (Be respectful) ski or snowboard picture of you, the winner will be announced at the end of the month.
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This should be rewritten. Something like "Send us your best (and most tasteful!) ski or snowboard picture! We'll pick a winner at the end of each month and announce our decision here. The winner wil have their picture featured on this page for a month, and receive a free ski or snowboard tuneup."

Notice how it flows better? You don't apply for a contest; you enter it. "Contest entries", then, not "contest applications".

Split hyphen; "Picture must be ski- or snowboard-related."

Click on "Skis", then click on "K2". It's 404.

You've got a picutre of your store, and your store hours. But where is your darn store? This will hurt your for searches and presence, too; if I search for "ski store your town", I should hit your site. But I won't, because your town never appears on your homepage.

Click on "Gift Certificate". I reach a page that tells me to go to the online store. I thought I was already in the online store? Sure 'nuff, that link doesn't move me.

The online store is very odd; it seems to try to embed other online catalogs and product lists into your own page. That comes off as inappropriate or awkward most of the time:

Click on "Accessories", then "Turtle Fur". You end up looking at a sidewalk sale for another store! Click on "Clothing", then "NorthFace". There's a "Contact Us", but it's Contat them, not you.
 
There is a scroll-bar along the bottom of the page when using in 1024x768 resolution. This is a highly popular res and the problem can easily be fixed by decreasing the length of the bottom and top banners and/or making the iframe narrower. It should improve the site's appearance.

The top part of the right menu doesn't transition well into the banner. It seems to be darker on one side than the other and there is a visible line dividing it from the banner. Try to make it the same color. Also, perhaps shave some of the empty space from the top of it (the side menu).

There is a slight issue when using Firefox.. there is a small gap between the top banner and the side menu.

The body of the page does not fit very well with the style of the banner and menu. I would definately change the font and add some more images into the body as well as more content, it just looks too plain.

When you click on links in the side menu they all have a repeating background (repeats of the image of the skier). I would definately change the background so that it doesn't repeat. Also, I don't know if it's a good idea to open someone else's site in your iframe.

Other than that, the design of the top banner, side menu, and bottom banner is great.
 
The whole thing is a mess if Flash is uninstalled/disabled. You need to put in fallback content. Or better yet, just remove the Flash logo.
 
Like erorr404 stated, the font used for the body content just doesn't fit in with the rest of the site. it's also centered, which also doesn't work. the horizontal scroll is way too wide.

i really like the "curvy" lines in the logo and footer, it fits the ski theme perfectly.
however, the angular style and different font styles/colors of the navigation container is jarringly out of place, plus the drop shadow effect really doesn't look right at all.

it looks like you've thrown together several different design approaches, each of which may be fine on their own, but don't quite work together in this case.
 
I'd move the hours and contact info right onto the first page instead of a seperate page, or add this info plus the directions to the About Us page, and remove the directions link on the right hand side.

Grammer, caps and fonts are inconsistent throughout.

The background image is tiled, at least in Firefox, either stretch it or change it. Nothing worse than seeing a fullsize and 3 partial copies of the picture.
 
Sorry, I left the site as soon as the flash music started... Just as I do most all sites like that.
 
Definitely work on your phrasing. As mentioned, some of it is very awkward.

"Season rentals for juniors and adults with free lift ticket*"

I get horizontal scroll at 1024x768.

Nowhere on the home page does it mention where you are located.

Another thumbs down on the flash/music.
 
Thanks guys, thats a whole mouthful right there.

I fixed most of the stuff you guys mentioned, I will have the client rewrite the About Us page, I actually didnt put that in.

I will try to work on the 1024X768 scrolling thing, Ill have to play around with it.

Any ideas on how to make the site in a whole look more...streamline?
 
Frames and embedded sound.

I didn't stay long enough to even look at what would almost certainly be invalid (x)HTML and table-laden crap.
 
The flash logo looks bad when it changes color and the stretch image to the right doesn't. It would be better to create some sort of transition from the flash logo to the image so that it blends better.
And frames are bad. Regular frames, iframes, any frames should not be used unless they serve a specific purpose. If the purpose was so that flash logo doesn't constantly reload, then you made the wrong change, you should take away the flash logo, or make an animation that isn't repetitive, or simply make two flash logos, one with the opening animation, then one that only color changes on all the inner pages.

The menu also looks out of place. You should never have the menu on the right. It should either be on the left or the top.

Truthfully, I just don't like the layout, its doesn't flow at all, it just looks like a bunch of different components slapped together from a template.

P.S. Another web design addage: Content is king. If there isn't any content, people aren't going to give a crap how good your site looks, or if it has flash, or music. Right now, your content is slim and lackluster. Content is also what gets you hits, both from visitors and from search engines.
 
ShockTech said:
Any ideas on how to make the site in a whole look more...streamline?
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Make your own store (or catalog). Don't embed content from other sites expecting visitors not to notice.
 
Any of the page clicks to the right lead me to a page with a guy skiing down a hill, it's tiled and doesn't look too hot.

That's what I quickly noticed.
 
My opinions:

Get rid of the flash header/nav - it's a waste of time. No one really wants to look at flash in terms of a header/nav.

Company name should be more prominent.

Frames (or IFRAMES) suck.

Less links on the right.
 
A few things:

1. The layout needs to encompass the entire page. Meaning, the menu on the right would look better on the left and the content on the left of the menu (obviously).
2. Nothing matches. Nothing looks like it goes together.
3. Header needs to be redone to match the site.
4. The content area needs to mesh with the look and feel of the header.

I hope this has been helpful. Good luck.

Aaron
 
The Good:
-Header Design
-Footer Design

The Bad:
-Horrible sound when the page first opens. (annoyed the crap out of me - and my coworkers)
-FRAMES?? What the -- no. bad.

The Ugly:
-Tables for layout - need I say more.
-Horizontal scroll bar at 1024x768
-Vertical scrollbar in the content frame.
-Full screen at 1280x1024 side bar looks funky
-remove the stylesheet and it's a total nightmare

I want to like the site -- the header totally draws you in, But then you have that horrible noise and then it gets worse from there. You had my interest but killed it with frames and other nastyness.

You have one of the hard parts down though -- your header completely rocks and it generates interest in the rest of the page - you have the hook but you just need to deliver and back it up with something substantial. (and complient).

And one more thing - when the user click on "A Mark Quiriconi Design" in the footer - your page title states:

"MarkQuiriconi.com - It's my site bitches!"
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Not something I would put up if you want to keep and expand your current clientele.
 
erorr404 said:
What's wrong with using tables for layouts?
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ooooh boy.. i think you just opened a can o' worms around here :)

a couple of small example of the power of CSS layouts
- ever wonder why people go through the hassle of making "printer friendly" pages? because with a table-based layout, you can't control the parts of the page that are printed. Say you don't want the navigation section to be displayed when you print. In a table-based layout, you have to make a whole separate page that doesn't include your nav column. In CSS, guess what? you make one single print stysheet and simply set your nav div to display:none. VIOLA, you've eliminated the need to make two copies of each page just to accomodate a printer-friendly version.

- your boss comes along and says we want to move the nav section from the left to the right side of the web site. Have fun doing that with a table layout, especially if it's a bunch of nested tables. with CSS, all you do is change the location of the nav section in the stylesheet and VIOLA, the entire site picks it up automatically.

- oh noes!! all those users with shiny new Blackberries have having problems rendering our table-based layout! it's too wide to fit on their puny little screens!! We don't need all those frivilous pictures because of our limited bandwidth!! CSS to the rescue, your flexible CSS stylesheet can serve a stripped down version to different user agents. Again, no need to re-write your content to fit different needs.
 
There's no reason for the main content area to have a scroll bar. The menu on the right looks awkward and runs off the page.

Flash sucks.

The website looks horrible in 1024x768
 
very interesting, i never knew about CSS layouts, but i dont think it's necessary for at least my purposes.
maw said:
- ever wonder why people go through the hassle of making "printer friendly" pages? because with a table-based layout, you can't control the parts of the page that are printed. Say you don't want the navigation section to be displayed when you print. In a table-based layout, you have to make a whole separate page that doesn't include your nav column. In CSS, guess what? you make one single print stysheet and simply set your nav div to display:none. VIOLA, you've eliminated the need to make two copies of each page just to accomodate a printer-friendly version.
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good point about printing, but on my site there is no info that is useful to print. besides, i always highlight stuff and print selection when i do print something out from a website. i could make a seperate print page as i use includes (one for the top, one for the content, one for the bottom) and it's easy for me to make a page with just the content include.

maw said:
- your boss comes along and says we want to move the nav section from the left to the right side of the web site. Have fun doing that with a table layout, especially if it's a bunch of nested tables. with CSS, all you do is change the location of the nav section in the stylesheet and VIOLA, the entire site picks it up automatically.
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i dont have a boss :p, but i wouldnt have a problem doing that anyway. i just move the column tag and it's contents from above the content part of the site to below it and VOIlA, it's on the right.

maw said:
- oh noes!! all those users with shiny new Blackberries have having problems rendering our table-based layout! it's too wide to fit on their puny little screens!! We don't need all those frivilous pictures because of our limited bandwidth!! CSS to the rescue, your flexible CSS stylesheet can serve a stripped down version to different user agents. Again, no need to re-write your content to fit different needs.
Click to expand...
what are blackberries? my main table is around 800px wide so it shouldnt have a problem with 99% of it's viewers. and again, i could easily make a page with a smaller table and put my content include in there if i had to make it smaller.

i will look into these CSS layouts however since they seem pretty flexible.
 
erorr404 said:
very interesting, i never knew about CSS layouts, but i dont think it's necessary for at least my purposes.

good point about printing, but on my site there is no info that is useful to print. besides, i always highlight stuff and print selection when i do print something out from a website. i could make a seperate print page as i use includes (one for the top, one for the content, one for the bottom) and it's easy for me to make a page with just the content include.
Click to expand...

this may not be an issue with your specific site, but imagine a large website with thousands of pages that need printer-friendly versions? and while you may know how to highlight and print, most users only know how to hit the printer button.

i dont have a boss :p, but i wouldnt have a problem doing that anyway. i just move the column tag and it's contents from above the content part of the site to below it and VOIlA, it's on the right.
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again, imagine a large website designed using nested tables.. do you really want to go through each and every page to move a column tag?..of course you could take your chances with find and replace, assuming every nav column contains the exact same links.

what are blackberries? my main table is around 800px wide so it shouldnt have a problem with 99% of it's viewers. and again, i could easily make a page with a smaller table and put my content include in there if i had to make it smaller.
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the point is, you shouldn't need to create different pages to show the same content, it's redundant and time consuming, especially for large websites.

Basically, you can control the look and feel of an entire website, to various different devices, for various needs, from a handful of CSS files.

Sorry for diverging off topic...
 
You're right, it is a simple task to just move the navigation column to the bottom of your table, but you have to do that on every single page.

Plus, what happens if you don't want it in a column, but a row at the top of the table; that requires you to re-code the table for the new layout. On every single page.

What happens when you decide to update the look of your site entirely? With CSS, you've seperated the layout from the site content. You can reuse all of your existing content pages and only redo the CSS file. With a nested table layout, you need to redo the entire layout, for every page, and input all of the content again.

Take a look at my website, animeguru.com. I've got a built in style switcher that shows what I mean. Every single page is the exact same HTML code, just with a different CSS stylesheet applied to it. Granted, you won't likely be using a style switcher like I do, but you can see how simple it is to redesign an entire website by only changing one file.

Think of it this way, you say how easy it'll be for you to change your layout in the future because you use includes. Think of CSS as an include; an include of the way your site is to be presented. AND you can include different presentations based on the end users device: computer, handheld, printer, etc.

With CSS you can tell your website to show the entire site as you want it on a computer, then tell a handheld device to hide all images, then tell a printer not to print the navigation.

You can have a single include that contains all of your navigation for the website, then tell each page which set of links to show. So you could have your main page show links to navigate to every section of your website, then have each section contain only the more detailed links pertaining to that section while hiding all of the others.

You can make your links in color on the computer, then tell them to be underlined for printing on B&W printers.

You can add the full URL next to a link within the document so that users who've printed a page can reference the link itself rather than finding the page on your site again and clicking the link to the document you were referring to, and keep them from appearing on handhelds and monitors.

You can set it so that your logo appears on the top of every single page printed from your website with a full URL so that people know where the document came from.

You can not only hide images with CSS for handhelds, but if you've defined those images within the CSS itself, you can omit them from your handheld stylesheet so they aren't even downloaded. Ever tried downloading a 200k image on your cell phone, only to have it not displayed anyway?

Server side image maps are still supported in browsers, but who the hell wants to use them anymore?? Talk about a PITA and a complete waste of time.

There are literally dozens of reasons to abandon a nested table layout in favor of CSS. Sure, nested table works, and will continue to work, but it makes life difficult, especially down the road. Plus, who wants to slice an image into 30 little slivers and then realign them all within a table when you can just have one image here and then tell the browser to lay the text on top of it there.


Really though, it's up to you. If you want to stick with the tried and true, enjoy coding your new website in Word on Windows 98... I mean, it does the job, doesn't it.



what are blackberries? my main table is around 800px wide so it shouldnt have a problem with 99% of it's viewers. and again, i could easily make a page with a smaller table and put my content include in there if i had to make it smaller.
Click to expand...

Also, I don't know what screen resolution you viewed the site at, but 800x600 the entire online store navigation is cut off and at 1024x768 you've got around an inch that is cut off. Of course, this is assuming that your users are running their browsers full screen. I hope no one wants to look at the site with a browser not expanded to it's maximum. You want to cut out 800x600, that's fine by me, people need to upgrade, but honestly, there is absolutely no good reason that anyone at 1024x768 should experience any horizontal scrolling.
 
just do a Print preview of animeguru's home page (and mine too) to see what we mean by not needing to make a separate "printer-friendly" page :)

now back to our regularly scheduled thread. Again, I apologize for going off-topic.
 
animeguru said:
Take a look at my website, animeguru.com. I've got a built in style switcher that shows what I mean. Every single page is the exact same HTML code, just with a different CSS stylesheet applied to it. Granted, you won't likely be using a style switcher like I do, but you can see how simple it is to redesign an entire website by only changing one file.
Click to expand...

Your style changer breaks if I don't have referrer logging on.
 
maw said:
this may not be an issue with your specific site, but imagine a large website with thousands of pages that need printer-friendly versions? and while you may know how to highlight and print, most users only know how to hit the printer button.


again, imagine a large website designed using nested tables.. do you really want to go through each and every page to move a column tag?..of course you could take your chances with find and replace, assuming every nav column contains the exact same links.


the point is, you shouldn't need to create different pages to show the same content, it's redundant and time consuming, especially for large websites.

Basically, you can control the look and feel of an entire website, to various different devices, for various needs, from a handful of CSS files.

Sorry for diverging off topic...
Click to expand...
i see that there are many advantages using CSS on big sites, but my point was that tables can also work well in certain cases (like on my site).



animeguru said:
-- snip --
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i never said that using tables for a layout is better than using CSS layouts, but that in many cases it can do the job just as well - most of the features you mentioned are not needed on my site.

actually, i didnt even know about CSS layouts until maw replied to my question. the reason i asked was because i didnt know of any other way to make a good site layout other than through use of tables. i will definately look into CSS as i have no idea how it works in terms of layouts, and you mention some really cool stuff that it is capable of.

i dont think i'll redesign my site into CSS however, as tables divided into includes seem to be working just fine. i think it is perfectly practical to use tables in my case.

you also seem to be a bit confused here.. i am NOT the original poster and you haven't seen my site.

btw, AWESOME website, i love the style switcher. ;)
 
ok one thing i didn't like ( what the hell do i know) and im not sure if anyone else said this yet but, on the home page the scrool bar inside the page. That tends to bug the hell out of me.

And on the store hours page, the background, i'd either ditch that, or make it one streteched pic.

But otherwise nice lookin page!!
 
i think that a lot has been covered on what i would say but here goes

the double scroll bar doesnt do it for me. i use my wheel all the time and it pisses me off when theres a double area for scrolling.

and i like the layout, but on the laptop im on it just bugs me. its seems like the top nav bar is just too damn big.

other then that it looks decent. stick with a certain style andit will be good

cheers
 
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