treehouse : what would you like to learn today?
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Looking for criticism

  • This is my first stab at Magento, please give me your honest thoughts. If you hate it tell me, if you like it tell me.

    You may find a broken link or two, but for the most part everything should work. There are very few products because the store is not live yet and some categories do not have products yet.

    I started with the blank Magento template and just did some basic styling.

    Things I have noticed are the fieldset and legend tags, and I threw Chris's slider on the homepage until I get the time to write my own.

    http://www.onegraniteplace.com
  • It looks very good (IMHO) the one thing I did notice was the links at the bottom of the page are close enough together that non-savvy users may get confused as to which link they are over if they decide to use them, but overall very nice.
  • Thanks Sure, I forgot to increase the line-height in the footer.

    I bumped it up, added some padding between the columns and set the text decoration to underline on hover only. Looks better already.
  • Much better. Did not dig into the code much but it is clean and attractive.
  • The reflection on the title doesn't quite work. The opacity needs be lowered a lot, but I would just remove it completely.

    I'd remove the text in the search box or reword it so it doesn't get cut off (I would just remove it).

    Other than that I don't think I have any complaints.
  • Yes Yes, definitely do something about the reflection! Otherwise, it looks nice!
  • Reflection is gone and after a lot of searching I was able to remove the text from the search box as well as the redundant word 'search:' in front of the actual search box.

    Thanks
  • Looks much cleaner now.
  • I also added a drop shadow like effect to both sides of the container. It is subtle but it makes it stand out.

    Any other ideas to give more of a polished look?
  • "thunderhawk6630" said:
    Any other ideas to give more of a polished look?

    Elements of Great Web Design: The Polish
  • Yea, the changes look much better.

    I noticed one thing when I just looked at it now, your nav and content section is off by 1px it looks like.. its 1 px over to the right so there is just a 1px line appearing on the left. I'm using the latest Firefox if that helps.

    On a side note, I've never had anything look correctly in IE, but not FF. It's always the other way around. ALWAYS. ;<
  • I noticed the 1px to the right thing as well :)

    That polish article is also a good read :)
  • IMO I think it would flow better and be more consistent if there were no white space btwn the content and sidebar.
  • Yeah, that one pixel thing I can only get in Firefox 3, I don't know what is causing that. I'll look into it further.

    Unfortunately, after a lot of headaches, I restyled the site for Zen Cart. I really liked Magento, but there were just too many issues that we were running into. So for now, I went with reliability. But I would love to see Magento become more stable.

    Thanks for the kind words everyone.
  • from the home page, I have no idea where you are. I had to look at Contact Us, not sure, but I would
    like to know where your business is right off the bat, would probably not look at your services if you
    are not close to me for business

    Al
  • I guess I pay more attention to the content details on a web page than whether you use shading and
    colours. partially colour blind anyway so not sure if I see all of the effects people are trying achieve.

    Al
  • I'd really like to see more pictures of the tiles 'in-situ' as the current pictures of the tiles don't really do justice to the final product. It wasn't until I had a good look at the kitchen picture on the homepage that I went "Wow those are nice".

    Also, is there any way to make ordering the sample kits easier. Perhaps having two options on the product page - "Add to Cart" and "Order a Sample" - would be more intuitive than the current system?
  • Also, is there any way to make ordering the sample kits easier. Perhaps having two options on the product page - "Add to Cart" and "Order a Sample" - would be more intuitive than the current system?


    I am working hard on that, I think that my only option is to make a duplicate item for every single product we have and place a link to it on the product page. I am working very hard to come up with a different method for ordering samples, because the current method is just not efficient. Zen Cart works great, but some things just aren't built in.

    Sorry to get off topic

    from the home page, I have no idea where you are. I had to look at Contact Us, not sure, but I would
    like to know where your business is right off the bat, would probably not look at your services if you
    are not close to me for business


    We don't have a brick and mortar showroom, just a warehouse and office. We are selling online only. That's why you can't find us, no retail. :D

    Thanks for the comments