Hi All, I am looking for some advice on a website I have operated for over a year. I am looking at a re-design and just want some feedback on design issues I may have with the site. Some feedback aon what people like and dislike about the appearance and set up of the site would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in Advance The site is http://gamedaytradingcards.com
I don't know if a redesign is needed from an appearance point of view. You've got tasteful colors and useful font sizes - I'd probably open it up to a semi-fluid layout so it can grow/shrink as needed depending on the users screen, maybe axe the double border in favor of some form of gradient and maybe try to blend the site title into some form of 'full header bar'... but really the cosmetic changes would be a lot less than the functionality ones. The first thing that really grabs my attention is the use of images for text with no images off fallbacks. That would be amongst the first thing I'd try to fix along with the use of separate images for your menu... that brings us to the real changes needed - which are all under the hood... the biggest of which being that STUPID MALFING MOTHER PUSS BUCKET mm_ javascript image rollover bull. Not your fault, you probably just used what dreamweaver told you to - unfortunately it led you down the garden path on decade and a half out of date methodologies that were a bad idea BEFORE we had deployable CSS, and has no place being used on a website after 2003. Further 'issues' include the inlining of static CSS defeating the point of USING CSS in the first place, tables for layout, and non-sematic markup. Even if one was to retain the current appearance, the markup needs to go as there is more of 1998 to it than 2010. This can be seen in the home page being 35k of HTML when you are only delivering 2.8k of content and 18 actual "content" images... meaning there's little reason to be using more than 10k of markup... That puts two thirds of the HTML used in the 'unnecessary bloat' department. Given the layout and functionality of the page it also begs the question what is that 106k of javascript even FOR? The answer is advertising other people's **** that I'm not even seeing here thanks to an adblock. You've got your own **** you are trying to market, why are you wasting badnwidth advertsing other people's ****? Literally your advertising bar is showing your COMPETITORS!!! DON'T ADVERTISE FOR THE COMPETITION! Any ad revenue you get from that is probably cutting into your sales by sending people to your competitors! That would be like Coca Cola's website having pepsi ads on it. I would REALLY try to get the template without the content images down to below 50k. The 18 content images appear to already be at 5% lossy compression making them 32k or so, not much room to compress those further... but the template itself could certainly be brought down to the point where the size could be shrunk 50% or so... Your 21k mainheader.jpg for example is line-art - change that to a 32 color .png and it would only take 7k. (with less damage than the jpeg is doing!)... the 29k 'ozcardbanner.jpg' would be a 9k palettized png, etc, etc... So there's a lot to fix on a new version of the site... But it could also be a heck of a lot worse. Just do yourself a HUGE favor, and pitch that steaming pile of manure known as Dreamweaver in the trash, and go get a plain text editor for building the next version.
Hi deathshadow, Appreciate your response. I understand most of what you are saying but if you could respond in more basic terms would be greatly appreciated. I assume the first thing is get rid of the image rollovers for the menu. The second is create more links using text and less using images. The third was saving the images as png and not jpeg. Does this effect quality???. The third is get rid of adsense from this site and focus on my main target of driving traffic to my sales areas. The fourth is that dreamweaver obviously generates are more html heavy template in the background. I did know this already but would like to know more how this effects my sites performance for the viewer or is it just that the site will use more bandwidth on my hosting. I would love to ditch the steaming pile of manure as you put it but.... It is my tool of choice and I do not have time to make the change know. I have a pretty good grip on the tool and just want to make it work it's best for me. Any further advice would be great. Thanks
I haven't taken a look at the code, but merely from a visual point of view: - The menu seems like from a decade ago, get rid of it as soon as possible . - All seems too "square", too constricted with everything encapsulated (with borders)... Learn the value of blank space as a designing tool, let the elements breath.
You should be recognized the importance of the process in developing a website. You need the whole team to discuss the design of the website and how it will affect its department. For example, the coding issue will fall under the developer, the aesthetic will fall under the web designer, the browser friendly site means you need to consult the seo specialist. To make sure the design is appealing you need to ask common folks, regular visitors and not technical people. For the design to be professional, you need to ask somebody who have corporate experience.