Hey Guys/Gals, I am new to the forum and would really appreciate some feedback on an e-commerce website I've put together, specifically regarding the drop down menus at the top of the home page. I mocked up the website design and had a developer do all of the rest (I only have a working understanding of HTML/PHP/CSS). The site is built on the Volusion e-commerce platform. The idea was to create a warm and friendly looking site that is easy on the eyes and easy to navigate. www.peachlamps.com Our website sells projector lamps, the replacement lamps that go inside your projector when the bulb goes out. Ideally, a visitor would be able to select their lamp manufacturer from the "1" drop down menu which would then populate all of the projector models in drop down menu "2" where you could make your selection. Currently, this works okay for manufacturers with relatively small product lists. For manufacturers that have lengthy product lists drop down menu "2" can take 5 or 6 seconds to populate. i.e. Epson & Sanyo Some of our competitors have very similar menus which populate with no delay/lag. I believe there is some Javascript currently running this menu function. I'm sure there is a better way to do this. I would really appreciate any feedback on enhancing the menu speed as well as an other feedback you may have regarding the site design/layout/etc.... Thanks!
While nice to see an attempt at responsive layout, it's badly broken here with the 'breakpoints' not corresponding to the content sizes at all -- and even when they do trip, there's massive side-scroll issues. Most likely that comes from the stupid malfing image rotating nonsense, which rarely if ever is real-world deployable if you are building a responsive layout, and even then usually is little more than content-space and bandwidth wasting garbage that has no business on websites in the first place -- no matter how 'pretty' they are. The black on that dark orange has legibility issues -- as well as several other points on the page being below accessibility minimums on color contrasts. The inconsistent font sizes and element paddings also make it seem like things were just thrown on the page any old way instead of being planned out. Under the hood, the markup is 100% rubbish. First line proudly proclaims much of it's problem -- transitional, which is to say in transition from 1997 to 1998 coding practices. (though admittedly that's what HTML 5 seems to want to recreate). It's got pointless headers, header values that don't even EXIST (there is NO SUCH THING as 'INDEX' or 'FOLLOW'). There's endless pointless jQuery bloat for nothing, scripttardery to create the inaccessible "placeholder" style nonsense (also known as 'false simplicity'), static scripting in the markup, no media targets for any of the CSS, multiple CSS files for Christmas only knows what apart from trying to make the page load slower, SCRIPT in-between </head> and <body> (where NO tags can go), endless pointless DIV for nothing, classes and ID's for nothing, gibberish use of numbered heading tags, presentational images in the markup, broken/incomplete forms lacking LABEL or FIELDSET, table for nothing with complete gibberish code inside it, multiple tables for nothing garbage, tables for layout, clearing DIV like it's still 2001, static style in the markup... I could go on for quite a while. Which is how it ends up wasting 40.5k of markup on 1.5k of plaintext and maybe two dozen content images -- likely four or five times as much code as needed for such a simple website -- that's why under the hood the HTML really is a laundry list of how NOT to build a website. Though that's quite typical for off the shelf e-commerce software...
The issue with the h-scroll is due to using a table for the "Featured Products". Actually, it's three or more nested tables. That's a Bad Thing. A gallery like that is a list, not a table. cheers, gary
Thanks for the honest replies. Given my rudimentary understanding of web design and coding I understand the gist of what you are saying. This site was built off of an existing e-commerce template so it comes as no surprise that there is a lot of “junk” underneath the hood. Given the fact that I cannot improve the site any more on my own, should I look at hiring someone who knows what they’re doing to clean up the site? Would it make that much of a difference in terms of performance, compatibility, etc…
Get rid of the Green, no offense it looks nasty, the rainbow strip at the top and bottom looks like wallpaper from the 60s. Your site needs a over haul ASAP Remember this today's sites are clean in color and design check out Google merchandise store for ideas...
You need to modernize. Get rid of the gaps. It needs to be fresh and clean. Otherwise great start. Good luck.