Can I have a site review please

[dmc]

Folks. Can you have a look at our latest release and post your thoughts. Webit.net is a Free B2B marketplace for which we’re about to start the PR push and I want to know your thoughts/criticisms. Please don’t hold back.

Regards
David

www.webit.net

[Swiss]

Nice and clean design. Is there supposed to be something different in your 'Products' area, as when I click it, it shows the exact same as the home page...
The site doesn't work well for a res of 800x600, theres horizontal scrolling - I'm assuming your using absolute possitioning?

You have some CSS validation errors, and you have not declared a DOCTYPE so your HTML will not validate. 'They' say that you should be aiming for loading times to be sub 8 seconds when visiting with a 56k connection, your site takes 15.75 seconds. I think by subsituting some of your images with CSS you could knock this down quite a bit.

[eskimo]

I get a horizontal scroll bar and I'm using 1048 screen res. Shouldn't stop you pushing the site though.

[drivetowin]

OK you said dont hold back so here goes

The width thing really needs sorting urgently - horizontal scroll bars are a big no no

Your privacy policy gives no details of your registration under the data protection act

There is a typo when looking at an individual company's details - it says venders webit shop when I think you mean vendors webit shop

There are other companies doing the same thing as you and doing it better (imho) - have a look at their websites and see what they do differently

The text is way way too small - I've got reasonably good eyesight (probably the one bit of me that is still working 100% lol) and I have to really struggle to read the text and the small text also means that the single letter links on the search page are a nightmare for anyone with limited manual dexterity

The top menu bar simply disappears when you are on the privacy policy and terms and conditions pages.

Be sure some of your text does not come back to bite you - "Whatever is free now, will always be free" - dangerous statement to make should you ever decide to charge in the future - and also if you dont charge I'm struggling to see how you have a sustainable business model - but maybe I'm missing something.

Each entry has a field for regions covered but there does not appear to be a way to search by region (again unless I'm missing something)

Good luck with it but I think it needs a bit more work yet

[dmc]

Thanks for this, all useful stuff. Please feel free to keep it coming.

The page width. One we know about and are addressing.

The Privacy Policy lacking DPA reference is a good point and I’ll look at that.

Typo. Thanks

Regarding the text size. I’m guessing that you used Firefox to browse. We know we have an outstanding bug with this browser but it’s not on the first round of fixes purely because we’re finding as a B2B site were getting 85% MSIE (The rest I’m putting down to me!)

We stand by the text (in fact it’s one of the principles of the company) that ‘what is free will always be free’ and we’re not insane and have a solid background in the B2B/B2C market.

Regards the regions. Probably needs to be made clearer, but if you select your self as being in say Kent; the program only selects offers that cover that region though you can opt to see offers for all regions. (We’re finding that everyone is just selecting all UK for both themselves and all offers)

Load time should be (and as we’ve seen reported) very fast so I’ll look into that.

Regards the comments about other companies doing the same thing. I’m not sure that there is. I can give you listing sites and Import/Export sites but this is very different. To quote from some of our promotion material:

'Webit.net supports both buyers and suppliers and intelligently brings the two together. If you post a product onto webit it will tell you who is currently looking to buy it. If you post a sales lead it will tell you who can currently supply it. Webit uses its powerful and unique technology to match the needs of buyers and suppliers.'