Please Review FlooringGuide.com

http://www.flooringguide.com for your conveniance...

1) The logo is jagged and blurry and overall doesn't look good. If it wasn't blurry and not jagged then I think it would look fine.

2) I don't like the graphics where half the text is over top of a solid color, and the other half is on a white background. Not only is it tacky, but the text is jagged.

3) S**** the award graphics. Unless they're really popular awards, then no one cares. They only take up loading time and space.

4) The site would look fine w/o the big black ugle bar on the left side.

5) The corners to some of the tables are jagged. Try to make them all look like the ones on the left side menu. Nice and clean and not jagged.

6) The top menu doesn't look good at all on resolutions above 600 pixels in width. 'Cause above that size leaves a large yellow bar sticking out.

You got the layout down though...

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Critiquing over 1000 sites on the Internet today...

Overall, I think the page looks pretty good. All you have to do is do some touching-up for the images, like the logo on the left black bar.

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I think this is pretty good. As justin said, you have to fix your graphics (always anti-alias!)

THere are a couple of things with the layout that are not quite right. Firstly, I think the site should be close to the top of the page. It's strange how there's all that white space at the top with the ad, and the actual site starts a ways down the page. Maybe you could fiddle with the logo so it would fit to the left of the ad.

Another thing that doesn't look right is the top horizontal nav with the checked background. The yellow background and the checked part should probably end at the same place. Either that or the checked part could be centered on the yellow. The thick black line along the top should also end at the same place as the yellow part. I hope that makes sense. Look at this in higher resolutions. Of course, you could sove the whole problem by using a fixed width table (center on the page!) instead of a flexible one.

Why do you have entire other sites loading inside your template. That's a problem for a bunch of reasons - those site owners may not want you to frame them, it tells your visitors that you haven't taken the time to make up your own content, some of those sites may feel that you're stealing their content, it's really anoying when only abiout 1/2 the screen is available for content, and it just plain doesn't look good. If you have to use other sites for this, be up front about it. Call it flooring links or somethning, and open those sites in a new window.

Now into your store listings - you should sort these by city/town (once you get into the area code) rather than alphabetically. I went into my area code (519) for example - this covers a large area in south western ontario - I doubt people in Kitchener would be interested in stores in Windsor or Owen Sound! Sorting by city would make it much easier for people to find something close to home. It is very nice to see that you're at least including Canada and the US!

I hope that you are linking to the stores homepages if they have them. It would be nice if you could allow them to make up a page to let visitors know what they offer, news of any sales or specials, stuff like that. I mean, people can just as easily find a flooring store in the yellow pages.

I do appreciate all the feedback so far. To clarify a few things:

As far as the other sites loading into our frames. We have asked for and received permission for most (a few didn't respond, but in our request we mentioned that no response would be considered as permission). As a matter of fact, in our original layout, we did not use the offsite frames but some of the major info suppliers requested we do so that they could insure the info was always current.

As far as the images, top nav bar etc. go, I will reorganize those areas taking into account your thoughts, especially the images.

The listings are organized by area code so far since we don't have enough listings overall to warrant individual city pages. The city pages exist and as we become more popular we will move to that format. Area code 519 happens to be our area code as well!

I certainly appreciate your thoughts and comments. I just really wanted to say Thank You!

Bob

Well, you wouldn't have to make separate pages for each city - just a put headings on the area code pages for each city (or maybe divide into sub-regions or something). I think it would be a lot more useful that way.