Professional views on our New Website?

[jameschurchman]

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Hello All,

I guess I should introduce myself...I'm James and I'm the web designer for Brighter Bathrooms (www.brighterbathrooms.com) and I have been working with Ryan and (currently) Sachin for the past year (well done so far guys!).

During this time, we have had a couple of website designs, but this recent one will hopefully tick all of the boxes for the affilaites.

The new website is currently live and I would really appreciate your feedback on the layout, style and ease of navigation?

I will be logging on to A4U everyday from now on to get to know you guys and learn a hell of alot!

Hope to hear from you soon.

Regards

James

[deadgoodundies]

I hope you don't take this wrong way but for me the layout and amount of information on the home page was hurting my eyes - it just looked to busy and cramped for my personal taste.

also you have got table borders inside table borders which looks rather messy for example checkout

http://www.brighterbathrooms.com/bathroom.php/baths

[bapages]

Also, I cannot see your privacy policy which is a must for an e-commerce site.

[jameschurchman]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your quick replies. I think the main reason I have many tables was to allow the site to be very busy and give it structure. The problem we had before was that the site didn't have the choices available immediately and we were advised to keep the pages busy, similar to www.screwfix.com and www.richersounds.com.

It's amazing how many different shapes our website has taken ove rthe passed year with Webgains, but I am determined to get it right.

I will speak to the programmer and discuss the issue with the tables. How did you find the navigation?

With regards to the privacy policy, it can be viewed within the terms and conditions at the header and footer. Would you suggest we don't use it in PDF format?

Thanks again for the replies. Speak to you soon.

Regards

[Chris Clarkson]

I really like it. All very simple and intuitive navigation. Nice colours with enough whitespace to keep each part individual.

Haave a look at the site in Mozilla as the tables tend to have borders showing.

Maybe highlight with bold or colour on the left hand menu to show me where I am on the site?

Chris

[bapages]

James,

PM me your e-mail and I will forward a document ho assist.

[awoodw]

FYI
Site fell over when I tried entering an alpha character in the quantity box in the checkout screen. Error was
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/httpd/vhosts/brighterbathrooms.com/httpdocs/sr_formattable.php on line 6
Cheers,
Andy

[Birdlepop]

I like it generally, but...

If I was being picky, i would say that the first thing I noticed is that you don't have any ALT tags on images on the home page, and so you may lose a bit of score with the search engines (debatable) and it reduces accessibility.

I also thought it was slightly too busy and as a designer would have suggested expandable menus with categorys and subcategorys (e.g baths on root menu and then the 5 types of baths being shown on hover-over) as a means of minimising the sheer amount of text on the nav menu.

Also, get some quality, relevant inbound links quickly with good anchor text.. PR of 3 isn't too great for such an established domain. (not really relevant to the design)

Finally, i always like to see a telephone number clearly visible on every page rather than an icon. Now i am getting REALLY picky! (and as an affiliate sales leak, I am not sure some on here would agree...)

Like the colours though, and good to see that you have done a mod rewrite for search engine friendly URLs.

[jameschurchman]

To: bapages

My email is: james@brighterbathrooms.com

Send the file when you have time.

Thanks again for the help.

[jameschurchman]

FYI
Site fell over when I tried entering an alpha character in the quantity box in the checkout screen. Error was
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/httpd/vhosts/brighterbathrooms.com/httpdocs/sr_formattable.php on line 6
Cheers,
Andy

Hi Andy,

I will look into this and correct this error. Please keep this advice coming, it's all very helpful.

Cheers

James

[jameschurchman]

I like it generally, but...

If I was being picky, i would say that the first thing I noticed is that you don't have any ALT tags on images on the home page, and so you may lose a bit of score with the search engines (debatable) and it reduces accessibility.

I also thought it was slightly too busy and as a designer would have suggested expandable menus with categorys and subcategorys (e.g baths on root menu and then the 5 types of baths being shown on hover-over) as a means of minimising the sheer amount of text on the nav menu.

Also, get some quality, relevant inbound links quickly with good anchor text.. PR of 3 isn't too great for such an established domain. (not really relevant to the design)

Finally, i always like to see a telephone number clearly visible on every page rather than an icon. Now i am getting REALLY picky! (and as an affiliate sales leak, I am not sure some on here would agree...)

Like the colours though, and good to see that you have done a mod rewrite for search engine friendly URLs.

Hi,

I will sort out the ALT Tags this week. I completely forgot to add them. The menu idea was an idea I was playing with, but I was worried it may affect the search engine spider trying to find them?

The telephone number is a major talking point, but we have designed the site to fit with affiliate requirements.

Our other site www.bathroomheaven.com is more showroom and sponsored link based.

Do you guys have any advice on selling the Brighter Bathrooms website to affiliates to use?

Thanks again for all of the help.

Regards

James

[DomainsUnlimited]

I like it, although I prefer your other site (bathroomheaven).

You could possibly add in a couple of rotational animated images for particular special offers (or where you have a stock pile and need to shift them! )

To make it attractive to us affiliates, you need to look at your competitors in the marketplace and see what they are already offering affiliates then either up the ante and/or detail your USP's and why we should now promote your company in preference to them.

Look forward to your offers.

Good luck.

[jameschurchman]

I like it, although I prefer your other site (bathroomheaven).

You could possibly add in a couple of rotational animated images for particular special offers (or where you have a stock pile and need to shift them! )

To make it attractive to us affiliates, you need to look at your competitors in the marketplace and see what they are already offering affiliates then either up the ante and/or detail your USP's and why we should now promote your company in preference to them.

Look forward to your offers.

Good luck.

Hi,

Luckily I had 3 weeks to make the Bathroom Heaven site, and only 1 week for Brighter Bathrooms.

I will discuss the affiliate offers with our marketing department and check the budget available. Hopefully, the fact that the average sale is around £350 will help affiliates take us onboard?

I agree with the animated GIF's to bring people into the offer pages. I have setup the banner section (currently saying 'fantastic savings on bathroom products') which I will be rotating with animated GIF's each week to promote new offers.

The Righthand Panel will also have different offers each week and the Top 10 product list will also change weekly. Hopefully this will help the site to stay fresh and updated.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

Regards

James

[JustBuyOnlineLtd]

James,

Where you put the basket/login details (bottom left) is completely against all usability research.

The table-in-table-in-table all with borders catches FireFox 1.5 off guard on pages like this one.

I'd space the search results pages, especially when no result is found you can hardly read the notice.

Unexpected PDF for t's & c's isn't the best of ideas IMO.

Looking at a page like this you will probably find it hard to get indexed in the search engines well. The ratio of actual body content to peripheral static stuff like all the left hand navigation and right hand promo stuff is not in your favour. Add more body content for each section/product.

You've copied the META descriptions into the META keywords.

Your checkout relies on Javascript without submit buttons. I (and others) have Javascript off by default and could not check out at all. Asking for referer details first would have put me off as well and I'm now stuck there with no way of continuing. The footer also needs to be spaced away, further down. I also find it strange how you first use asterisks * for required fields but don't mention they;re required and then change to underlined for required. Stick with one or poeple get confused. Underlines are for links so make them *s.

I also think your buttons don't look likt buttons enough. Especially on the log in page where the header is exactly like the login button but without any visual reference saying one is different than the other.

Centrered text reads horribly.

Besides all that, it does look nice and fresh. Your product presentation is good, could just do with some more sales pitch. Most of the points above are easy to improve as well. Some are just IMHO, most are based on research facts.

Hope that helped.

[jameschurchman]

James,

Where you put the basket/login details (bottom left) is completely against all usability research.

The table-in-table-in-table all with borders catches FireFox 1.5 off guard on pages like this one.

I'd space the search results pages, especially when no result is found you can hardly read the notice.

Unexpected PDF for t's & c's isn't the best of ideas IMO.

Looking at a page like this you will probably find it hard to get indexed in the search engines well. The ratio of actual body content to peripheral static stuff like all the left hand navigation and right hand promo stuff is not in your favour. Add more body content for each section/product.

You've copied the META descriptions into the META keywords.

Your checkout relies on Javascript without submit buttons. I (and others) have Javascript off by default and could not check out at all. Asking for referer details first would have put me off as well and I'm now stuck there with no way of continuing. The footer also needs to be spaced away, further down. I also find it strange how you first use asterisks * for required fields but don't mention they;re required and then change to underlined for required. Stick with one or poeple get confused. Underlines are for links so make them *s.

I also think your buttons don't look likt buttons enough. Especially on the log in page where the header is exactly like the login button but without any visual reference saying one is different than the other.

Centrered text reads horribly.

Besides all that, it does look nice and fresh. Your product presentation is good, could just do with some more sales pitch. Most of the points above are easy to improve as well. Some are just IMHO, most are based on research facts.

Hope that helped.

Hi,

I'm glad I joined this forum as all of you guys have been top quality at spotting things we haven't thought of.

I will aim to make all of the above changes over the next week. If you notice any other glitches, please keep the advice flooding in.

Thanks again

James