Please Review my Site - Off Your Rocker, Handcrafted Rocking Chairs

They have: 7 posts

Joined: Mar 2010

Could I please have some reviews of my website www.offyourrocker.ca. Thanks very much!
Frank

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

This is not bad for a start. The colour scheme suits the product and it has sort of a homey feel to it. I really like the curve along the bottom too.

It looks like there's something wrong with the logo, like it's been resized incorrectly or something. You shouldn't use HTML to resize images - use a graphics program to resize the image, then insert it into your HTML. That way there won't be any distortions. Although, in this case, even the original seems to be distorted somehow. All the edges look jaggedy.

The biggest improvement you could make to this site would be to clean up the product pages. These pages are very long, with lots of pictures strung out. At first I wasn't sure if there were multiple designs on these pages or if all the photos were the same design with different finishes & fabrics. It would be best to keep all the explanatory text at the top, then have an organized photo gallery below. If you're selling things it's always important to have photo enlargements too. Some of your photos have them but some don't. Also try to keep your photo sizes consistent. Choose one width and resize all your photos to that size, then add a link to the enlargement. One of the keys to good web design is consistency.

Another thing you should do is avoid centring text. It looks unprofessional and it can be hard to read because each line starts at a different spot.

Your chairs look great! I wish I had known about you when I was putting together our nursery last year. All I could find was gliders and I hate that gliding motion. Gives me a headache.

They have: 7 posts

Joined: Mar 2010

First, I totally agree with Megan.
I look at the page of Store. The best improvement you could make to this page would be to enlarge the top-menu and side-menu. Specially, the side Categories menu, each line should separated clearly. That will help user to select right product to view. I mean the line-space should be increased and the fond size should be increased as well. It would be better to make the fond style more attractive instead of plain text.
The site's online shopping functionality is pretty good and the products are pretty unique. It is a good online business.

They have: 5 posts

Joined: Apr 2010

Hi, I like the functionality of your web site, the products you have, but I don't really like the design and the color scheme you choose. It looks a bit old and is not very appealing to the visitor. If you change the top/left menu, the color scheme and the top banner, you will gain more audience and for sure more customers.
This is an easy fix.
Great functionality and great products!

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Apr 2010

Yeah the functionality of the web site is working great. the only thing I think you may have to change is the image files are too big(size),it take a bit time to load it as some people don't even have the High speed internet, this could be a pain for them

They have: 4 posts

Joined: Apr 2010

I agree with everyone, nice product, I would change the pictures. maybe a little smaller and make the boarders around the pictures all the same size. Everthing I clicked on loaded real fast, I like your website.

andfinally's picture

They have: 4 posts

Joined: Mar 2010

Megan's right: it would certainly help a lot to reorganise the pics a bit more consistently. As lechen mentioned, it seems like some of your images are too big in kilobytes, for example "You go girl!" on your Nursery page. For best performance the usual advice is to save your JPEGs at 72 pixels per inch resolution with a quality of 6 (or 60%) - that's all you need. I do like the fact you have lots of good pics which really show the product: you just need to make sure your readers are always clear which variant they're looking at.

If you do redo the header image I would simplify the look by taking away the border and giving the image the same background colour as the page.

Redoing the nav menu would also make a big difference. The buttons are a bit hard to read because of the combination of the serif font with small pillowed images. You may like to keep the pillowed effect, but in that case I'd make the buttons about 40% taller, allowing a bit of space around the text. I'd also delete the border around the menu.

I also like the curve at the bottom, but I would put a 0 margin style on my body tag so the edges sit flush at the bottom and sides of the browser window.

When I view the homepage in IE8 the PayPal button appears chopped off floating to the right of the picture of Frank Bray, not underneath. I'm not sure what's doing on there - it's OK in Safari and Firefox.

It helps give a more professional look if you make all your colours and fonts consistent throughout - the main style seems to be Verdana black for the body text and Verdana colour #753027 for headings, but some pages have different styles - for example sleigh.html has some Times black body text, and the testimonials page has a mixture of fonts and colours. The pic captions on custom.html come in about three different variations - they should all be the same. To make life easier, you could just choose just one font, one body colour, header colour and caption colour and be strict about using only those on every page.

Hope this helps, congratulations on a great start and good luck with the business!

Cheers
Gareth

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