Helpful Information

Category: Web Site Critique Area

Out of Ideas

I saw some of the critiques on the "bird..." website and thought they were very constructive. I have a web site with an excellent product group and I would appreciate any critiques and new ideas that may help me make it more effective.
http://www.gicco.com

One thing to consider is your colors. There was an article in the WestHost Weekly a while back about choosing colors for your web site, and referenced a study that was done relating different colors with different feelings and adjectives. The back-issue can be found at http://newsletter.westhost.com/cgi-bin/mojo.cgi?flavor=archive&id=20030214173647&list=weekly but the part that is really interesting from the article is the following snippet:

----Begin Newsletter Snippet----

In North American mainstream culture, the following
colors are associated with certain qualities or
emotions:

Red --excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, danger.
Blue --(listed as the most popular color) trust,
reliability, belonging, coolness.
Yellow --warmth, sunshine, cheer, happiness
Orange -- playfulness, warmth, vibrant
Green -- nature, fresh, cool, growth, abundance
Purple --royal, spirituality, dignity
Pink -- soft, sweet, nurture, security
White --pure, virginal, clean, youthful, mild.
Black --sophistication, elegant, seductive, mystery
Gold -- prestige, expensive
Silver -- prestige, cold, scientific

----End Newsletter Snippet----

Using that study you may want to add some color to your web site depending on what message you are trying to convey to you visitor. I have seen web sites that break all of those "color guidelines" and still have a very successful appealing site, but it definately is something to consider.

I agree with Mark about working with the colors. I would get rid of the black background and add some muted creamy brown colors that are suggestive of coffee. Get it right and they'll smell the coffee beans when they view your site!

I like your site. I just wish it was a little more consistent from page to page. Every page seems to have a different background and text color.

Other than that, it l looks good. Keep up the good work. Good luck.

I still like black backgrounds best, especially when used with white, the contrast looks proffessional. I prefer just a two color site, more than three is disorienting.
Also, I found it hard to read the black text on the coffee background. Maybe white text would work better? otherwise good site. My 2 cents.

Get rid of the background image and use white. the text is very
hard to read and I agree with the coffee(tan) color for the background. Raise the link font size up and maybe less images on the front page.

Hope this helps,

One thing that I would suggest is a redesign of your main page, and creating subcategory pages based off of it. It is really bad in my opinion to make a user scroll very far to find any information. Take the important categories, make them into sections and label them at the left hand side of your page. Then put content and a world or two about your company on the right hand side of the page using most of the space. This will give your site a cleaner look and not discourage users who don't want to scroll to find information.

I also like dark backgrounds :) but agree that having the same colors sitewide makes it easier to use. I thought I'd been taken to all different sites when each link opened a new window with different colors. I would suggest not opening new windows, but then I'm picky about sites that take control of my desktop real estate. Use a navigation table (as previously suggested) for major sections of the site and include this on every page at the top, left or right side so users don't have to scroll and jump back to a previous window. I like the colors on the home page but if you used CSS you could get around the default link colors so they went with your color scheme.

I checked the source code and saw that you have three separate meta tags for keywords. Keywords aren't used much by search engines anymore so it isn't a big deal, but I would combine those keywords into one meta tag and pick only the most important ones for each page's content. Same thing with the meta description tag - combine it into one tag.

One more suggestion, use links on the images to the order form so you don't have to remember the name. I wasn't sure which product I was looking at and had to find the other window to know what item to check the price for.