[thelist] site check

Seyon evoltlist at delime.com
Fri Aug 6 08:02:26 CDT 2004


Message from thelist at punterspower.co.uk (8/6/2004 04:18 AM)
>Hi All
>
>www.milords.com

1. I'm almost certain the words "mens", "womens" and "childrens" need 
apostrophes.

2. What value does the date at the top of the page add? It doesn't fit in 
with the design at all, just floats there as an afterthought. If I need the 
date, I've got two calendars on my desk, one on my wall, my cell phone, my 
palm pilot, my palm pilot desktop interface and my system tray. I probably 
don't need an underwear site telling me the date too.

3. The small text is one thing, but not having your links do *something* on 
hover makes it quite hard to know when I'm actually over the link. 
Especially in the very tiny "At a glance" column. Why are those "READ ON >" 
links images anyway?

4. **Subjective design opinion** The men's and women's images are good high 
key photography with lots of white. The children's photo sort of spoils the 
consistency.

5. **Subjective design opinion** Why does the photo of the building 
vignette to white on the right? Because you know how to do that in 
photoshop? It doesn't mesh with the rest of the design. Nothing else fades. 
(Which is good because everything looks quite faded already.)

6. Have you tried viewing your site with images disabled? Corollary to that 
question - have you heard of alt tags? It's especially bad on the location 
page. There isn't a single piece of text on that page. Imagine I'm driving 
to Milords, lost and try to pull up the page on my mobile. Without images 
displayed the page is singularly useless. How bout some text directions? Or 
would those spoil your design.

7. Looking at your main nav bar. Let's toy with the idea that most 
important should be displayed first. Now assume people read importance from 
left to right, which they probably do. Are your Facilities more important 
than your Products? Is your Location and Contact Us information more 
important than your Products for that matter?

8. Do you really want an email address openly visible on a public website? 
Do you receive a kickback for installing and managing spam filters when the 
harvesters swoop in?

9. In their current states, Location and Contact Us could probably be 
combined into one page. I'd have a contact form rather than an email 
address on the site though. (see #8)

10. **Quality of content, not so much design** People should choose Milords 
because:
    - "you've got a purpose built UK head office". What does that mean? 
That's a really weak "choose me" statement. I'd choose a company because 
they have a quality product, not a purpose built head office.
    - "you've got productions plants in UAE and India", oh and one of them 
is state of the art. Great! So you're taking jobs away from the UK and 
funneling your labour through cheap third world countries. Yes everyone 
does that but is it a reason the company should be chosen?

11. Your font size is small but I think something as simple as giving the 
paragraphs a bit more line height will help readability immensely. (Which 
doesn't mean the font shouldn't be upsized, but it's an alternative 
suggestion).

12. You ask about accessibility like someone in the planning meeting said 
"oh it must be accessible!", probably because that's a buzzword these days. 
But no one asked accessible to whom, or what constitutes accessibility. I 
think you rely too much on images in this site. Simple things like "READ 
ON" don't need to be images. Nor does your header, or footer for that 
matter. Nor your "WOMENS >", "MENS >", "CHILDRENS >" links either. You get 
the idea.

13. Is "LOG_IN" really the way you write it? I don't see "CONTACT_US" or 
"PRODUCT_SHOWCASE". Why not "CLIENT LOGIN" or "CLIENT LOG_IN"?

14. **Subjective design opinion** The image down the left side. It's nice 
and all, but what relevance does it have to the site?

15. I can see you're going for the self-contained within-the-lines look. 
But on my display, which is 990x860 of browser real estate, there's too 
much empty white space outside, and everything looks squished up inside. 
Like 20 clowns in a beetle, big red noses plastered against the windows, 
floppy shoes at awkward angles.

16. You really shouldn't ask for feedback on a live site on this list. 
Because of its prominence (the list's, not the site's) and because the 
site's url will be quoted in most replies, and because the messages are 
archived and publicly searchable, you could open yourself up to some nasty 
repercussions. (Like these discussions potentially showing up above the 
site itself in Google searches - happened before, cost someone a job if I'm 
not mistaken.) Host the site at a staging location like 
example.co.uk/testing/clients/ml/ when soliciting comments.

If you ignore everything else I've said, at least heed #16. Really.

regards.
-marc

--
Trinidad Carnival in all its photographic glory. Playyuhself.com
http://www.playyuhself.com/


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