Hi all, just signed up here because it seems like a wealth of information for an aspiring web developer such as myself. I also want to get out of the way that I am NOT a professional-- this is my first website for a small startup T-Shirt business I co-founded based out of Hawaii. I was wondering if I could get everyone's input on my website, where constructive criticism is definitely welcome: http://www.salterclothing.com I built it from scratch using Twitter Bootstrap. The cart is just simple PayPal buttons stuff. Any input on it's design, color scheme, layout, compatibility issues, etc. would be very much appreciated. I'm looking to improve on the design and will take any feedback I can get. Thanks!
Great work for a beginner! How about working without a framework. It's not from scratch when you used something like bootstrap. Coding everything from your head is the best practice for a beginner, it helps you to understand HTML and CSS well and fix errors that you made.
Thanks Jack. I have no idea why I wrote "from scratch" as a framework clearly does not mean from scratch lol. I tried building it from straight HTML/CSS when starting out, but quickly became overwhelmed with incompatibility between different browsers (IE6/7, ugh) and between platforms (PC, mobile, tablet, etc). Bootstrap made my life 100x easier with it's capability of handling responsive designs. Maybe I'll take off the training wheels at some point, but right now I simply don't have the skill to REALLY build a website from scratch Thanks for your input!
Indeed, nice for a beginner. You will do good in the future if you keep it up. It is simple, yet good to understand.
It looks neat and simple. Great for a Beginner. Way to go! Love those icons from Elegant themes. BTW Good that you chose a framework/template to build this. If you'd built it from scratch, it would have taken months to complete it.
Thanks guys! Haha I love how you recognized the icon pack ManojKumar. I got one more question, I'm thinking of changing up the color scheme, and getting rid of the "container" look and just having a solid white background. For example... Original: Proposed Change: I'm going for this look --> http://www.rvca.com/ where the content "disappears" behind the banner separator line when you scroll down. It just doesn't work well at all with the black. I originally wanted the full-white background but my business partners vetoed it lol. What do you guys think? Does the all white look better and/or cleaner?
I would go with rather a creamy color. Maybe #ddd. The black/white looks unpleasant at least to my eyes lol. You can go with a gray gradient for the background. Checkout Adobe Kuler for more colors.
nice theme, it's relly cool, but wait please check on GTmetrix : gtmetrix.com/reports/www.salterclothing.com/7oxmv9Bo it is very bad for the performance, you should make a change and minimize your JS and CSS
I think its really neat! Simple, clean and professional! One suggestion would be to make the "Shop" button a drop down menu so you can hover over it and then go to mens, women's or whatever. Just makes using it a bit smoother. But that is being uber critical! I really like it and it looks much better now with grey!
Yeah I did a lot of research and tried to optimize the best as I could using tools such as PageSpeed and YSlow. How I went about it was, In regards to enabling GZip compression: This really depressed me. Simply put, my website host, HostGator, does not support GZip. I tried to find a way to implement it because it would save SOOO much KBs and loading time but ultimately failed. In regards to Minifying: I had a choice here. In the end I chose to not minify my framework's CSS file (bootstrap.css) because I often refer to the file, and minifying would make it much, much harder to read. The tradeoff was sacrificing saving ~20 KB worth of load time, and in the end I figured it was not worth the savings. I might change my mind on this though because that's a pretty significant number on EVERY page load. I didn't bother with my other CSS files as I would've only saved 1-2 KB each since they're so small. I appreciate the feedback though and I will continue to look for load time-saving techniques! Thanks! I did mess with a Shop dropdown menu in the early stages of the site's development, but in the end ditched it because we didn't really have a good variety of content or categories, so I felt that with our current products the dropdown looked sort of "empty" at that point in time. It is a good suggestion though and I will definitely think of re-implementing it once we get more products. We will have trucker hats soon so it might be sooner or later hehe. And I'm glad you like the gray! I still have no idea why my partners thought the black background and light container was a better look! It was 3 to 1 against me
Yeah fair enough, how do you come up with the designs for the tshirts? If you don't mind me asking! You can PM me if you would prefer I would like to talk more about the designs and possible designs.
Heading to the gym now and have a meeting later but I'd be happy to talk about it when I have the time!
Very nice website. Your T - Shirt collection absolutely fantastic for that who want to enjoy beach. I think you have to add more funky color.