Any advice gratefully received

I'm not sure whether I'll regret asking this but still...

At some point in the next 3 months (as soon as I can find the time! ), I'm planning on redesigning one of my sites as it's getting out of hand with the more things I add to it.

The backend side of things is fairly nicely automated especially the database updates but what would you do to improve my price comparison website ( www.onlinepriceguide.co.u...urce=Aff4U ) from a visitors perspective ?

No monetary compensation available but any good ideas will have my eternal thanks

Personally I would add some more colour to it , after I had looked at the first two panels on the right side nothing stood out lower down for me, so I would either use coloured bullet points and or a picture of the DVD or book too, I know that it may take longer to load but book/cd/dvd covers are designed to interest so let them do the selling.

I would make the left side panels/navigation narrower as it eats up almost a quater of an 800 by 600 screen and most of it is lost space, I would use a navigation bar on top for the long stuff and keep the left panel short so you could either use the extra space freed up to benifit the right side to add images to sell the products or make your content wider in the middle.

with regard to the middle content, there's not really much there thats selling anything for ya so rather than news I would just list more offers etc.

seems a little muted colour wise over all but very functional

thats my thoughts anyways...

I wasn't too sure whether I'd get comments like "I don't like that shade of blue" or "can you add comparisons for xxxxx to the site" but I worried for nothing!

thanks Shane for the very helpful advice - come on people, don't be shy and don't hold back, if you think it's crap then say so I'm a big boy now so I can take it! :rollin:

Well i had a look, but i'm a little stumped as to what to say.

The sites nice, and easy to navigate. Or at least it was by the time i'd worked out where the menu's were. I think you need to brighten up the navigation bar at the top. I bet nearly everyone uses the quick links, and no-one uses the drop down.

The only other comment i have is the type size. Until recently i used 8pt, and it was the most requested change. Now i've changed it i'm getting loads of thank yous. Seems there's a lot of people with dodgy eye sight out there.

I'd agree with some of the other comments, font size is pretty small and colours could be more distinctive. I think it's the blue text that makes it hard to read both on white and on the left/right columns.

If it was me I would bring the newsletter sign up further up the page so it's seen without scrolling.

In saying all that I've been to your site a number of times before and thought it was very well done.

Thanks for all the useful comments/suggestions so far.

If anyone still has some spare time on their hands, take a look at an initial preview example of the proposed change www.onlinepriceguide.co.u...yout2b.htm

This is just a very general example and I will be including some other modifications I'd already made on other pages at the site (e.g. the main pages for Home Appliances and Electronics).

To summarise, the changes include:
- modified the CSS file to use "nominal" size rather than "pt" sizes
- removed the right hand column completely
- changed the main layout table to be 100% rather than fixed at 750px
- changed the background colour for the left side "content blocks"
- modified links so that the background colour changes when the mouse is over them
- moved Newsletter sign up higher up the page

I'm really starting to like this version but then what do I know, I liked the last one when I did it too :rollin: