baby-planet.co.uk

Hi, I would appreciate your opinion on my commerce site.
www.baby-planet.co.uk We have been up and running for couple of years and sell our clothes from this site.
Honest opinions please!
Plus...a web developement company have suggested theat they make a focus site, only in HTML to direct traffic to us. Of course I said "not intereste", but intend to do this myself if it's not too big a task.Any ideas on how this would work? I imagine that it is lots of words and keywords and link to our relevant pages. No graphic and pictures. Thanks.

Well as you did ask, it's awful.

• The babys in that banner look like aliens
• The background shows up where it's repeated.
• The links go purple!
• Table based layouts are bad.
• There's no point in those red lines
• The layout is inconistent
• The code is invalid
• The e-mail link is barley readable
• So much more...

Overall it looks entirley amature.

hmm...i agree with tree

this is just not happenin!!

I wont repeat the bad points cos tree did a pretty gud job..lol!

try googling for some free professional templates.

fancy logos, just int the thing no more.

Its all about consistency, easy to navigate, simple , not too much content per page etc..

bear these in mind

It looks like you just jumped in a web dev program and began implementing.

try designing it first (maybe based on a template)

theres are loads of free css ones that look great

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The background just screams "amature"

OK thanks. I guess we wanted to get away from the bland white background of most shop pages, we are an individual company selling bright kids clothes...and that baby is supposed to be an alien!! (baby planet....geddit?!) LOL.
I didn't think there was that much content, but I'll have a look at some templates, as long as they dont have to look like marks and spencers!!

to put it polietly

marks & spensers poos on yours!!



edit: i just looked at http://www.marksandspencer.com/ and it really is pretty gud

I know you want your site to look bright and pretty, but remember it's also a representation of your company.

Take the honda site atm http://www.honda.co.uk/, it has rainbows flowers humming birds but also looks proffesional.

It looks like it took more than a day too make and like someone got paid.

Yours looks like a child did it.

BTW, M&S have a damn good site

i entirely agree with tree.

Don't get upset, but it is clear that the person who made that site has no concept of design, and that they didn't even try and fake it.

You can make a bright clean cut site without making it look amature. If you have time to learn design here are the basic things you need to do to make that a decent looking site:

- Get a beginners reference book about Photography, Javascript, CSS & HTML.
- Take the time to layout your site as if you were taking a photograph of a nice peice of landscape & buildings. Yes i actually want you to draw with a pen and paper the design of your site.
- Your bannar/logo clashes with your website.
- Fix your images: they are the first things your customers will see. Bad Images = Bad Products
- Take the time to write good descriptions for your products.
- Unify the design with some sort of layout. Lots of people make boxes around their main content with a lighter color background and a smaller one around their menu. Everything is currently just floating across the page which looks bad.
- Use CSS (Cascading style sheets) and link the sheet to all your pages.
- Use some sort of menu system that isn't just a bunch of slow & ugly image rollovers or links.
- For heavens sake please use a database backend. If it isnt possible to use it on the site, at least have one the the web developing computer.

This will make your life easier but will require you or your employee spending time to learn what the hell you are doing!

If all else failes spend a few bucks and buy a template that was made by a pro (50-100 bucks prob.)

I use this site as a web designer sometimes as a base and then i modify the hell out of it, or i use it for small jobs if im busy:
http://www.designload.net/list/website-templates/c_0_18.html