Thespecshop.com concept

Hey all, I'm working on a concept for thespecshop.com. I personally know them so this is just kinda like a side job. I don't know how much I'm gonna get paid but I was just wondering if you thought the concept is an improvement on their current site.

The only thing I'm not completely happy with is the header of the concept. It's abit empty but I'll work on it some more when I find time.

Well, there's the concept (note: its an image, not a webpage, so of course the loading time will be much longer than normal)

Thespecshop Concept

I will happily take both flames and praise, just be constructive!

Well my first impressions are good. Nice colour combination, smooth design. I can only comment on the layout which looks good. I dont know how fast the page will load? If you have any Flash etc in there.

Nice work, let me know when you go live. Would love to check site info a bit more.

that nissan doesnt fit in there, i would suggest going to a lighter layout, here is a concept i did for a customer for a similar themed site. www.mostardesigns.com/lz.jpg

Hey,

I love the design of the site. Cant wait to see the fully function site, keep up the good work.

Aphonik

Well, I've converted it to html format, its done with both tables and div layers. I'm still trying to figure out a way to display the menu images faster, there's no rollovers yet, but there will be. I'm going to do some searching on the net to see how I can make my menus load faster or just better in general. Well here's the html so far.

http://vc.thinkcomputers.org/specshop/

Let me know what you think on all levels of critique.

I think the site is great! I cant recommend anything else to change because I think its fine how it is.

Aphonik

Your mark up could be really nice, were it not for the tables and center tags

I like the background for the menu rollovers they're nice.

I don't really think the choice of car is the greatest either.

Your shout box doesn't work, i get a 404.

Other than those few points it's looking nice.

haha, i think the entire site is rad.

Goodjob, and goodluck with the website.

Three, I know you don't like tables, but i didn't really feel like dealing with some problems that div layouts cause... so I didn't...

The shoutbox doesn't work cus its not implelemented yet, its just there for reference for the future.

That's the owners car, so, I'm sure he'd want that there regardless. I like it tho.

Thanks for all the advice and comments!

You have to make your midsection exapandable,
the text overflows when you resizes the font-size,
the default font-size is in my opinion too small.

I don't really think the orange text goes well with the blue background a bit eye straining, it would look better if you tone it up a bit.

I would definitive clean up some of the markup, rather use css than deprecated elements like center.
And over time drop the tables.

I have decided to start to clean up the code... I can't get rid of all the tables, but nkow that I only have a two column layout, it will be easier to get rid of the layout-based tables.

I changed how the roll-overs work, now it loads 2 images (one norm and one roll-over) for all the links which = 2kb. So that will definitely improve loading time.

I'm still working with the right column to try and develop filler-sections. Thanks for your advice!

I removed all unnessessary tables and replaced the tabled-layout with div-layers. I'm still in the process of optimizing the code, if you could test with different browsers and report problems found, I'd appreciate it.

1) I redid the menu so that it takes only 2kb and 2 requests to load all the images for the roll-overs.

2) removed tables where divs could be used.

3) started to optimize css

I'm now going to concentrate on cross-browser compatibility. If anyone can help test it on different platforms, I'd appreciate it.

the url again is: http://www.thespecshop.com/beta