Hello all, I'm new here. I was wondering if anyone could offer some constructive criticism on my jewelry website. What I'm trying to do is make an easy-to-navigate site that's clean yet interesting to look at, and that would not drive away potential customers. The URL is www.lordalfredandoscar.com. Any comments are greatly appreciated, and I hope to hear from you soon!

SarahVA

sarahva,

Have you looked at the way your site appears in IE vs. Mozilla? They appear differently, but I'll only comment on the IE version.

I would recommend you reducing the width. You can either reduce the width just enough so there is no scroll bar at the bottom of the site, or you could even create some white space.

The menu bar at the bottom has a closed front and open end. Meaning the front of the menu has a vertical line, but the end of the menu just ends with the two horizontal lines. I don't know if you intended to do this, but I would recommend closing off the right end.

The main menu, where you select the type of jewelry, there is obviously no "next" button, but the space is still there. I would recommend taking the space out and just closing the menu off at the last jewelry option.

J_

Unnecessary whitespace at the top of the page. This forces an annoying scroll to see the whole page.

Thank you guys so much for helping! I didn't even notice how the right side of the menu wasn't closed. I'll definitely fix that! Good idea about taking out the empty space in the bottom of the jewelry page too. I might put an email button there, though, but we'll see. Also, I've got a question...I'm not sure how some websites are able to do this, but I think one of the problems with mine is that it displays differently with screen resolution -- mine is set at 1024x768, and it looks pretty much all right, except that I have to scroll over a little bit to view the pages, but with people whose resolutions are 800x600, the page is very small. Could anyone recommend how to make the page viewable for both screen resolutions? Or should I post this in a different section?

Thank you all so much for your help!

Sarah V.A.

You can resort to a lot intricate re-size manipulations, but I wouldn't. My rule-of-thumb is to take the most common screen size (which is currently 1024x768), and design for one step down (800x600).

Of course, if I'm running a highly dynamic site, such as a technical forum, I'll either design with fluid layout or go with 1024x768.

My suggestion for you is to design your site to display well on 800x600.

Thanks! Yeah, I started working on resizing it, and I'll see how it turns out. Thank you all so much for helping me out -- I really appreciate it!

SarahVA

Sorry to write again, haha, but how do you all think this looks? I'll have a different font on the "next" button, but for right now, it's just this template I have. www.sarahvanauken.com/test2.html

SarahVA

It doesn't fit 800x600, but it's better!

hy sarah its really been gud 2 see the design like this ur design is reaqlly awesome
actually i like the calritry part which makes me so dumb and stare like that u hve done a nice job
keep tryin

sarahva,

Your site should have some sort of menu to back out of a product page. Especially after drilling down within subcategories, people don't want to continually hit the back button.

J_