Website Design/Navigation feedback

hello
We've recently developed an ecommerce site for selling knives &
kitchen cutlery knives.

The site is www.discountedknife.com

We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback on design,
navigation, and any other issues you may see.

Thanks,

ali

ahashmi55 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com (Al) wrote in
news:5d51f77e.0408090755.702503e0 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com:

hello
We've recently developed an ecommerce site for selling knives &
kitchen cutlery knives.

The site is www.discountedknife.com

Fix the 226 validation errors on the site's main page.
Fix the errors in your CSS documents.
Don't use tables for layout.
You are missing alt text on images - see what your menu
looks like when you load the page with images disabled.

--
Dave Patton
Canadian Coordinator, Degree Confluence Project
http://www.confluence.org/
My website: http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed ahashmi55 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com (Al) writing in
news:5d51f77e.0408090755.702503e0 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com:

hello
We've recently developed an ecommerce site for selling knives &
kitchen cutlery knives.

The site is www.discountedknife.com

We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback on design,
navigation, and any other issues you may see.

Thanks,

ali

Well, you've surely got some accessibility issues. The font size is going
to be too small for some folks, and is not resizable in IE because you are
using points and pixels.

Additionally, because you are using nested tables, the pages take a long
time to load, even on broadband. Imagine how long it's going to take on
dialup.

Here's some interestingly invalid, bloated markup on lines 83 through 91
http://discountedknife.com/customer/home.php?cat=2391:

<tr>
<td width="1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">&nbsp;</td>
<td width="100%">
<table width="100%" height="2" border="0" align="right" cellpadding="0"
cellspacing="0" bgcolor="C96F20" class=Table2>
<tr>
<td class="Table2">&nbsp;</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>


There are a heap of markup errors, CSS errors, depreciated markup.

You really need to start with a clean template devoid of markup errors, and
nested tables. Plug in your server side code, and test the template again.

--
Adrienne Boswell
Please respond to the group so others can share
http://www.arbpen.com (domain in dispute)

In message <5d51f77e.0408090755.702503e0 (AT) posting (DOT) google.com>, Al
<ahashmi55 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writes

hello
We've recently developed an ecommerce site for selling knives &
kitchen cutlery knives.

The site is www.discountedknife.com

We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback on design,
navigation, and any other issues you may see.

Thanks,

ali

Use a graphics editor to re-size and compress the thumbnail images. They
should only take a fraction of the size that they do now. Don't rely on
the browser to re-size them.

Example: one image is 300x300 and is resized by the browser to 70x70,
but it still requires 42k to load instead of about 5k.

regards.
--
Jake

"Al" <ahashmi55 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote

We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback on design,
navigation, and any other issues you may see.

Setting a fixed font size throughout is a major design disaster.
I can barely read it in MSIE. If I use Firefox, I can zoom in to
read the text, but your page structure begins to break.

Alternatively, I can disable style sheets to read the text in
MSIE, but the site becomes incomprehensible.

But don't be disheartened by comments which seem to be negative --
the purpose of critique is criticism, not praise. If this is your
first website, you are doing OK. Use the feedback to make it better.

Al wrote:

hello
We've recently developed an ecommerce site for selling knives &
kitchen cutlery knives.

The site is www.discountedknife.com

You should always cite Web addresses as URLs, as in
<http://www.discountedknife.com> (note the inclusion of the scheme
identifier).

We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback on design,
navigation, and any other issues you may see.

Okay, here we go:

Put the home page on the home page, not at
<http://discountedknife.com/customer/home.php>. All this does is require a
redirect to be sent to the browser and adds several seconds to the load
time.

Get rid of the px and pt font sizes. They are too small on my browser, and
when I increase the font size back to something reasonable, your design
starts breaking. If this means your design is too fragile to handle
different font sizes, it's time to ditch the design for a new one.

Fix the 226 syntax errors in your HTML.

Fix the seven errors and one warning in your CSS.

Get rid of "click here" as link text, something like "Item details" instead
of "Click here for details".

Get rid of the table that's being misused as a layout grid, and replace it
with its modern equivalent, CSS positioning.

Redo the login so it doesn't require Javascript, which will mean you can get
rid of "If you have disabled Javascript in your browser click here"
completely.

Add a submit button to the form used to select a brand, so it will work on
browsers where Javascript is unavailable. Or, you could just get rid of it
completely and replace it with standard links that will work 100% of the
time.

The "contact us" form has no e-mail address one can just send an e-mail to
without filling in a cumbersome form that asks for a lot of information
that most people are not willing to just give to anyone. I should not have
to give my name, address, and phone number just to ask a simple question.

--
Shawn K. Quinn

Shawn
Thanks for your feedback. We will try to incoporate some of your suggestions.


"Shawn K. Quinn" <skquinn (AT) xevious (DOT) kicks-ass.net> wrote

Al wrote:

hello
We've recently developed an ecommerce site for selling knives &
kitchen cutlery knives.

The site is www.discountedknife.com

You should always cite Web addresses as URLs, as in
http://www.discountedknife.com> (note the inclusion of the scheme
identifier).

We will appreciate if you can give us any feedback on design,
navigation, and any other issues you may see.

Okay, here we go:

Put the home page on the home page, not at
http://discountedknife.com/customer/home.php>. All this does is require a
redirect to be sent to the browser and adds several seconds to the load
time.

Get rid of the px and pt font sizes. They are too small on my browser, and
when I increase the font size back to something reasonable, your design
starts breaking. If this means your design is too fragile to handle
different font sizes, it's time to ditch the design for a new one.

Fix the 226 syntax errors in your HTML.

Fix the seven errors and one warning in your CSS.

Get rid of "click here" as link text, something like "Item details" instead
of "Click here for details".

Get rid of the table that's being misused as a layout grid, and replace it
with its modern equivalent, CSS positioning.

Redo the login so it doesn't require Javascript, which will mean you can get
rid of "If you have disabled Javascript in your browser click here"
completely.

Add a submit button to the form used to select a brand, so it will work on
browsers where Javascript is unavailable. Or, you could just get rid of it
completely and replace it with standard links that will work 100% of the
time.

The "contact us" form has no e-mail address one can just send an e-mail to
without filling in a cumbersome form that asks for a lot of information
that most people are not willing to just give to anyone. I should not have
to give my name, address, and phone number just to ask a simple question.