Hi all, this is my first post here on digital point. A company that I work with is looking to update their website. They currently have one through the Shopify platform where they have bought a theme called 'Blockshop' and have been using it for a little over a year now. They have asked me to provide feedback on it and if they should now move to have a website created for them rather than using shopify. I was hoping some more of you could help provide a little feedback on what you believe the flaws and strengths of the site to be from a user's point of view. The company provide snowboard coaching camps and are planning to sell some off snow training equipment too. Their mission is to provide high performance and specialist coaching in a fun and affordable group. They want their course attendies to be part of their 'squad' and build a team spirit amongst all their clients. My first round of assessment I found that: • The site feels a little bland. There is no indication of the high performance nature or the fun nature of the company. • Although the structure of the products (camps) is good provided by the shopify platform each product page is just a plain mess. Most screens only have text in them. This is partly due to them not having much control over the look and feel of the site. • The accommodation page looks pretty outdated with it just being a list of places with no interaction. • Colouring seems to be working against the site. • I think they should have one booking form instead of treating each camp like a product to add to the cart. The link: http://www.ninjaacademy.co.uk Any feedback you could offer would be a great help.
Well... while I don't really care about the design, certain aspects of it doesn't really help. There are 36 validation errors in the code. The resizing of the site isn't properly dynamic on different screensizes (Try decreasing the size of the browser-window) - the image repositions and gets smaller, and there's a supposedly black background meant to cover the logo and menu that doesn't show until you hover or reload. Small stuff, perhaps, but it takes away from the quality of the site. The "accomodation" page has some issues, among them the "click on the hotel for more information and pictures" <- doesn't work. Why in the world isn't this designed as a normal booking-site (no shopping-cart) - just a selection of hotels where you can chose your category, then your specific hotel (I can see there are two hotels with "top" standard, it might be smart to provide the possibilty of having more hotels within each category) - and then book a room for a given date? I dunno - I understand that they have based this on a ready-made theme for a product that doesn't really fit their need, hence they should bin it, and start over (which it seems they're planning to do).
Im a HUGE snowboarding fan, why not imbed a video of you talking a little bit about the program ? It will help you increase your sales in that kind of a niche !
Thanks for the replies you two PoP I really appreciate the honesty there. I think swapping out the cart for a booking form makes a lot more sense. I'm not sure what's causing those validation errors. IQ great to hear, in a nut for it myself! The video solution is a work in progress, footage has been taken this winter that is being edited for use in the coming months.
The validation errors is probably due to the fact you have some sloppy code - I'm guessing it's something to do with the platform chosen. Nothing of it is disastrous, it just shouldn't be there at all. A rewrite, with a little bit more modern feel to it would probably not be very hard, nor go amiss.