Biting the bullet and having you critique www.wescosales.com

This looks good overall. Everything is in it's place, it's easy to see what the site offers. The highlighted products give a good overview of the products available. Everything is cleaerly stated and the price is higlighted well. There are a lot of hooks on the front page which is also good - lots of different ways to get into the site and find a product to buy.

One thing that this site really needs is a better logo. Experiment with different fonts and colours and see if you can come up with something more unique. You could also play with the capitalization so you might have WesCoSales which separates the words and makes the title more clear. You could do the WesCo smaller and Sales bigger, or in a different colour.

Speaking of colour, the colour scheme here is nice but it's a little dull. I would try replacing the dark red with orange or bright green. That would add a lot of punch to the site.

THe page titles could use some work - these are really important for SEO so you'll want to get some good keywords in there. So on the front page you might include your slogan in the title. On other pages you could include some popular brand names or related keywords.

I went through the process of shopping for a product. Everything is going smoothly so far. I'm looking at the shipping info page and the ont size is very small. it's hard to read. That should be increased. I had a problem when I tried to calculate my shipping cost in the shopping cart area. It didn't like my address and brought up an error message (I am in Canada).

Now that I'm at the second step of the payment process it looks like you don't accept credit cards. You actually can through Paypal, it seems, but it doesn't say so on the payment page. People might see this and assume that you don't accept credit cards, which would be a problem. That payment options bit should be rephrased so that it's clear that credit cards are accepted.

Overall a good job - I had an easy time finding and buying a product (except for the two problems mentioned above). The site was easy to navigate and looks good enough. Not amazingly great but good enough that it won't hurt your business.

Did you end up getting that CSS problem fixed?

Thanks...I've got lots of work to do...I'll keep ya'll posted on the improvements.
Carrie
Perfect practice makes perfect!...my daddy's favorite quote.

When you first open the site the great thing is you instantly know what the site is about from your slogna at the top and array of products. I think this is great.

The main top banner however does look a bit cheap. The slogan is ok but the main name 'Wescosales' just looks like a boring font and makes the name quite unmemorable and doesn't really make you look at it.

I agree with Megan about the colours being a bit dull and think she's correct in saying an orange or a green colour instead of the red, you want your site to stand out after all.

I think the paypal banner right at the bottom maybe better placed at the top so people instantly know cards are accepted, even if you had to shrink the banenr it would still be a good idea.

I liked the little white links at the top of every page, I think you should keep those and the current site layout, its so easy to navigate!

I would mainly just say get a better logo and brighten the site up a bit. Apart from that the site should do very well.

I like the design, I think it looks very professional. Dull, I wouldn't call it that; "Conservative" is a better description. For a commercial site, I really think the more conservative approach is better.

I really think that if you do nothing else, having a decent logo/graphic at the top would really punch it up. I'd venture to say that you could even make that single change and firmly move away from the "conservative" comments. It's not a bad thing if the products draw the attention and are the most interesting things on the page.

I don't think you need to move the Paypal banner to the top. Displaying it right when you place something in the cart seems fine to me.

I like your product detail pages, they contain tons of information and nice, large images.

Nice work.

Thanks..just to let everyone know...
I've fixed the shipping page font, put the paypal logo on the shopping cart page and also included the shippingcalculations for Canada and some other countries. I'm working on a "not so dull conservative" logo...still working on the CSS problem...but even with multitasking with family and coding...it may be Monday before I get it all together. I will be coding in my W3Cschool validation too after I get the one CSS error fiqured out. I'm really excited.
The input has been extremely helpful.
Gotta get back to perfecting...
Carrie (WesB86)
wescosales.com

"THe page titles could use some work - these are really important for SEO so you'll want to get some good keywords in there. So on the front page you might include your slogan in the title. On other pages you could include some popular brand names or related keywords."
Megan,
I included the slogan with the title on my home page...you suggest on the other pages...is this the main pages(accessories, car audio and video, cbs, health and beauty) or every tilte product page?
Thanks again,
Carrie (WesB86)
wescosales.com

Firstly, add a background colour. For browsers out there that don't have the default set to white, it looks really weird and ugly. A background colour should be one of the first things that you set when one makes a site.

One of the first things I experience is a feeling of being overwhelmed and strangled. There is a lot of objects to look at and not very much "white space."

Although the "SAVE 30% to 60%" is pretty important, it's not as important as the products you're trying to sell. Therefore, having it as the very first thing in big bold(?) text may not be a good idea. Try putting it lower or reducing the size of the text or both.

Why have you got a whole list of brandnames on the right hand side when they don't actually link to the products with those brands? I would be tempted to get rid of it all together, giving you more space to use for displaying your products.

Off to a nice start, I just find it a bit cluttered that's all. Remember, white space is your friend.

This is very tight for a first site. Scales well at multiple resolutions. Very obvious what the site is about. Only negative I see is with the main logo at the top: Some pixelation at 1280x1024 resolution. Also, I think the logo could be a little bigger given the amount of real-estate that's been given to it...