Review BestDrones2Buy.com

Hello please review http://bestdrones2buy.com/

What do you think of the look of the site?
What about the sites usability?
What could it add/takeaway to make it better?

Thanks!

 

The tall thin fonts have severe legibility issues at the smaller sizes -- one of the reasons I'm always railing AGAINST the use of webfonts on content. Likewise the light grey on white text and pathetically undersized fixed metric (px) fonts leave me diving for the zoom and tempting me to override the style with user.css; altogether that makes for a bit of an accessibility mess. In particular if you think 11px is an acceptable thing to declare on a font-size, just do us all a favor and back the **** away from the keyboard.

The lack of a bottom border on the product boxes looks more like rendering error than intentional design, maybe if there was a fade or something similar, perhaps with a darker surrounding background it would feel a bit less spartan and buggy. Mind you that part is not ACTUALLY buggy, it just feels unintentional. What is bugged is you've got some really screwball issues with the hover behaviors on those products, some show, some don't, some overlap the testimonials... that's just a mess. Likewise the "placeholder" style garbage on the search is a major accessibility failing; that form (and most all your forms on the site) have major usability issues due to being malformed, incomplete and generally not how forms are supposed to be done.

While it's a cute attempt at responsive it does seem to break at a few size, and the load speed could be a bit better. At almost 2 megabytes in 106 files it's a bloated mess, file counts in particular since from a brief ad-hoc count I don't see any reason for that home page to be much more than around 300k in maybe two dozen files. I'm starting to smell bootcrap, at which point you might want to find a stick to scrape that off with before you go tracking it all over the web's carpets.

It's knee deep in scripttardery with endless JS for nothing -- not seeing a blasted thing on that page to warrant 41 separate scripting files totalling over 600k. The same goes for the train wreck of CSS -- you are at almost a megabyte of CSS FOR WHAT?!? much less the ridiculous 31 separate files; basically you've got three over 70 files coming to 1.5 megs doing the job of 2 files and 64k of code.

That raw number of handshakes being the real issue -- we're talking a relatively plain looking and simplistic layout, so that 20+ second real world handshaking overhead and over two minute worst case scenario on first load is REALLY going to bite you in the backside. Around the ten second mark you're going to start seeing visitors bounce before the page even finishes coming up.

Pulling up the document outline shows a willy-nilly use of numbered headings with no real structure; missing headers, headers starting subsections without the appropriate level parent heading -- it's just gibberish. Endless multiple sections starting with the same "Share on" text doesnae make much sense, much less I'm pretty sure text like "DJI Inspire 1 Drone – Worlds Best 4K Flying Camera Quadcopter Drone" or "DJI Spreading Wings S900 Hexacopter Drone" aren't meant to be subsections of "Share on".

Remember, an H1 is the heading under which everything on the page consists of subsections, h2 indicate the start of subsections of that h1, H3 indicate the start of subsections of the H2 preceding them and so forth -- you instead seem to be using them in a nonsensical manner almost like you chose your tags based on appearance instead of what they mean.

Finally peeking under the hood many of the reasons it's such a mess in terms of file counts is immediately explained --the typical train wreck of what happens when turdpress meets frameworks meets outright outdated and buggy coding practices. Endless pointless style and scripttardery inlined in the markup, little if anything remotely resembling semantics or logical document structure, tags and attributes that have no business on any website written after 1997, endless pointless wrapping DIV and classes for nothing so typical of letting turdpress just sit there crapping all over the place...

As I keep saying, if you don't know what's wrong with this:

<body class="home page page-id-883 page-template page-template-home page-template-home-php no_js responsive stretched gecko">

Code (markup):

or this:

<div class="hide-topbar " style="display: inline;">
    <div id="nav_menu-2" class="widget-1 widget-first widget widget_nav_menu"><div class="menu-top-menu-container"><ul id="menu-top-menu" class="menu"><li id="menu-item-1747" class="yith-woocompare-open menu-item menu-item-type-custom menu-item-object-custom menu-item-1747"><a href="#">COMPARE</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-1826" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-1826"><a href="http://bestdrones2buy.com/wishlist/">WISHLIST</a></li>
<li id="menu-item-1835" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-1835"><a href="http://bestdrones2buy.com/order-tracking/">TRACK</a></li>
</ul></div></div></div>

Code (markup):

It may be time to review one's skillset and take some time to learn how to use HTML and CSS properly instead of letting a bunch of off the shelf rubbish crap out markup any old way.

Therefore it is hardly a shock that it's wasting 152 of markup on delivering 15 content images and 4.13k of plaintext -- basically TEN TIMES the size that HTML should be!

You've got some interesting concepts, but your choice of tools and development methodology are greatly hampering the usefulness, functionality and speed of the site. It's an excellent example of what happens when you over-rely on off the shelf solutions and the ridiculous bloated mess that typically results; in many ways you've got a poster-child for everything wrong with web development today, with ten times the total filesizes and five times as many separate files as should have been used.

Again though, entirely what one can expect when HTML 5, turdpress, endless poorly written plugins, and garbage "framework" nonsense like bootcrap and jQueery are thrown together in blind hope the result will actually be a properly built website.

Sorry if that seems harsh, but I figured someone should tell you this sooner than later.

 

The overall look and feel is great in my opinion. It also adapts to mobile very well -- I was impressed. But it took a while to load the page and after looking at how it's built I understand why.

I'd strongly suggest running your website through Google Page Speed Insights. It'll give you a check-list of items that you can use to improve the page load time of your website:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http://bestdrones2buy.com/&tab=mobile

 

Were we looking at the same site?

Of course it's even WORSE now that some annoying scritptard animated crap has pissed all over the usability for some gooftard images floating all over the damned place... because of course the site wasn't hard enough or slow enough to begin with, no had to go and piss all over it even further with crap that is slowly making it a runner-up for the worst website ever

It's gone from the typical train wreck of HTML 5 meets turdpress, to "are you ***ing kidding me?!?"

 

I'd change the ADD TO CART message on hover over to MORE INFO. People are not ready to add to cart anything the moment they land on your page.

And... I would remove those flying thingies as it has been suggested. They are like bugs buzzing there for no reason. It's going to be a deterrent, trust me.