Please Rate: Pimp my iPod.com

They have: 19 posts

Joined: May 2007

Hi

I have set up an e-commerce site selling permanent vinyl decals to put on an iPod.
Like cases / covers they protect it from scratching, but they paper-thin, and just as durable.

Anyway, the site is located at http://www.pimp-my-ipod.com, if you guys could check it out, point out any errors etc that would be great Smiling

James

He has: 629 posts

Joined: May 2007

Hello,
Things I like:
- Colors, images, and layout are very attractive
- The Welcome message is short, sweet, and inviting
- A lot of useful information is up-front on the home page, but the page does not seem crowded or overwhelming
- Simple navigation, with a link to a help page, invites me to investigate futher.

Things I'm not thrilled about:
- Font size set in pixels. Internet Explorer users must go through hoops if they need to make the font size larger
- I think the Welcome message would look better left justified, with extra left and right margin or padding. Centered text is so 1990s
- You don't seem to know if you are coding HTML or XHTML - there is a mixture
- In part due to the previous problem, there are dozens of coding errors, including duplicate IDs
- You seem to be using an old version of Dreamweaver, which outputs inaccessible code, (mis)using tables for layout.
- The scripts are wrongly enclosed in HTML comments. Once needed because Netscape 1 did not recognize the SCRIPT tag, it can give problems in modern browsers

Bottom line:
Nice design, a bit spoiled by using an outdated tool. I suggest you take a look at Microsoft's Expression Web Designer.

Cordially, David
--
delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

Brooke's picture

She has: 681 posts

Joined: Feb 1999

Breathing room! That's the first thing that I noticed.

The text in the body is too close to the edge.
The decals are much too close together.
The text in the boxes on the left is too close to the edge.

In IE the "add" buttons are to the right of the text - but in FF and Opera they are below - ick. Side to side is better!

The text is a light gray - It would look better in dark gray or black in MHO!

At the top the graphic with the ? by help - that looks bad. The line around it is really jaggy.

The header text that is in the left boxes should be a bit darker.

I would love to see a picture of an iPod with the skin on to get a better visual! After all - it's the visual that you are selling!

Otherwise I think that it's easy to get around and a good stab at it!!

They have: 24 posts

Joined: Jul 2007

I was looking forward to evaluate your website but it seems that it is currently unavailable. Please post a message here when it will be back online as I am interested not only to give you a personal advice of the feeling that I get when navigating inside your website (very important when expecting customers) but also related to what products and services you are offering, as I am an iPhone fan myself.

Thank you!

They have: 19 posts

Joined: May 2007

Hi - thank you to everyone for taking the time to visit and evaluate my website! I will be changing parts of my site based on your feedback, and thank you for pointing out problems in my versionn of dreamweaver - I will look into the Expression kit as I have heard some good things about it.

Re; the site being offline, a few people seem to be experiencing this for some reason - at first I thought it may have been a DNS / propagation issue, however the domain has been set for at least three weeks now. If anyone could lend a hand on this I would be very grateful. My host installed cPanel 11 recently, and I had problems setting up mail accounts on it so I deleted the account on WHM (the site had a subdomain and pimp-my-ipod.com parked over it) and re-created the site using the URL as the account name, i.e. not just parked / addon from cP (hope/ that makes sense), so maybe that has something to do with it, or could it be an issue with my registrar?

Thanks again for your advice, and sorry to those who were not able to access the site - If anyone could provide me with the actual error message they are receiving, and their ISP then that would be a great help. Similarly if anyone knows of a possible solution / diagnosis of this problem then that would be a big help.

James Smiling (using webTV so pls excuse any typos where it decided to leave a letter out)

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