Please review: seethisitem.com

I can only speak as a visitor to a site as I still know nowt about design - The site felt comfortable to use - all the instructions were nice and clear - nothing too difficult - I liked the form only wanting an email (I wont fill in any more than name and email) the only difficulty I had was finding the home button - I just expected it to be at the top of the navigation list. I am not sure if having the home button at the top is normal but maybe all the sites I visit have it there. I just assumed that there was a natural pecking order for navigation lists with 'home' being most important and 'about' being least.

I do hope this was helpful. I know so little that I am not even sure if this is the kind of critique that is looked for. If I am wrong then please can someone tell me so

Magnolia you did well, critique from all levels is good for the designer as some things can often be over looked by the more advanced folks who are code based or screen based ...

Janet, frames frames frames You need to loose the frames or at least unlock the navigation side (so has scroll bars). At 800x600 with tool bars etc I can't se the home link, I know the banner is usually set to home (in this case it is) but being over to the right it just doesn't seem right.
Your code to force the frames is a good idea (if javascript on) but the url becomes very long and messy and could be bookmarked, it looks like this:
http://www.seethisitem.com/index.html?body=http%3A//www.seethisitem.com/how_it_works.html

Some of your images, like on image help the images are fuzzy (compressed to much).
Around the site you use a bit of underlined text (and of different colours), this can be confused as links as maybe just bold and/or italic, example: Newspaper Classifieds just got EXCITING! (exciting is underlined and dark blue or dark purple).

Information wise there is one thing thats missing, does this work world wide? By the sounds of it, it probably would, but stating it should may be better for you.
We have a coupld of mags that probably wouldn't allow this as they make a sideline selling pic ads.

I notice you don't have a terms and conditions page, you need one to protect yourself. It just basically needs to say that you are not responsible for the images, whether they be stolen or fake ... not to hold you liable ...

Is a good idea, I hope it takes off for you. Do loose the frames though

Leaning away from the website, my first thoughts reside with your company name. I can't really justify it as a 'brand.' With your service being cheap i feel you need something more memorable and fun than what you currently have. I know everyone is trying to be the next Google but people just latch onto cool brands.

What about something like 'MySnap!'...?

Thanks for all the responses so far. I really appreciate it.

And, Busy, thanks for bringing up the world-wide issue, for some reason, I never thought to inlcude that on the site. We have had lots of customers from outside the U.S. already use our service, mostly Canada & the UK. We even had a home for sale in Bangladesh and a car in Venezuela! I think I will incorporate that into the site.

robfenn, I think I am going to use your idea of contacting publications (from a previous thread) regarding our site. I will let you know how that goes.

Magnolia, I don't know why my developer put the 'home' link on the bottom. It bothers me too. May have to change it.

Keep the ideas coming!

Site is great, concept is unique.

However, I'd move the FAQ button to nearer the top of the list, and the 'about us' button dead last.

Potential customers and looky-loos want their questions answered first. After you've reeled them in, then they'll want to know who you are.

Hi , just a little advise here....

You are using frame on the left and top, which most search engines think it is not friendly and may affect your ranking in search engine.

secondly, you forgot the button "home" , which redirect people back to the homepage. When i go to next pages (by clicking the left buttons) , and i want to go back to homepage, i need to retype the URL again.

Overall, your website is fair on design , and have a unique business concept on it.
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James
ERP software
Singapore online store

jamestcs, thanks for the review. The home button is the last button on the left navigation and it is on the bottom of every page. You can also click on the 'seethisitem' logo on the top of the page to go back home. There are basically three ways to get back to the home page.

However, you are the second person to mention this, I never realized how hard my 'home' button was to find. I may have to look into this. thanks.

I think that the content on your site is great, but the navigation is somewhat confusing. I would rethink the order of your menu buttons; a few people already mentioned moving Home to the top, but I would also consider juggling the other buttons; maybe "How it Works" before "Why to choose us"? Personally, my first inclination was to check out the very basics in "How it Works", because the information in "Why choose us" wasn't relevant until I knew what you were offering. Hope that helps.
Tom

The navigation could be a little bit confusing. Else I like your site ...maybe you could make it more active ...

How about ad of the week, typo of the month, sale of the month, funniest, craziest ... or weekly but would become a chore for you if quiet

I find the many different fonts to be distractive and unattractive -- although I'm sure it is to draw attention to different areas of importance. I do like the changing pictures which point out the varying items for sale and I thought it was easy to navigate through.

say you had something like funniest of the week, if you were quiet (low amount of ads) you'd have to try pick something to fit into that category, if you repeat the previous weeks the content looks stale, if you pick a random one your comps can look rigged or fake so becomes a chore if there is nothing suitable. Maybe just start with eye catching or something then add others as you get a consant flow of different types. Monthly would be better as would make people list longer and/or list more

determined, can you be more specific regarding the fonts? In your opinion which area in particular does not look good? Most of the homepage is verdana font with the exception of the two images. Is that what you are referring to? I don't want my site to look unattractive.

busy, I removed the underlines as you suggested. I also added a worldwide line item on the faq page. I want to incorporate the international thing on the homepage as well, but not sure how/where to include it. Any ideas? thanks!

You could just add something like "usable from anywhere in the world" or "for world wide service" in your main text.
You could also put a mention in the "why use our services" page

If you want to go a step further, on all prices on your site you could do something like $1.99, this will create a dotted underline on the price and when the mouse held on it will display what the title says.

the word 'free' in this sentence: Our photo hosting service is FREE to try ... needs to be another colour, keep the blue to links only.

I made a few more changes to the homepage based on some suggestions here. If anyone is interested in taking another look. thanks again!

Perhaps not wanted but I cannot see how this will compete with the services of the Publications that offer the actual insertion. What I would be more interested in is if I was posting/placing a larger advert in a Newspaper and did not want their crap library shots. Move outside of the cheapo classifieds and more into display adverts.

Thanks for the response, I am always open to opinions. You are correct in that it would be hard to compete with publications that offer online photos to their advertisers, however, there are close to a million daily newspapers. Plus, hundreds of thousands of non-daily newspapers, magazines, pennysavers, etc. This is just in the U.S. alone and not including worldwide publications. Of that number a vast majority of these newspapers do not offer photos to their classified advertisers at all. They are smaller publications, but there are lots of them. They are the papers I am targetting not the larger publications that offer photos already and I am contacting them directly regarding our service.

As far as display ads go, I am working on that angle as well. I just began marketing to companies that offer statewide classified ad and display ad newspaper insertion and one company is already interested in discussing further how our services can benefit each other.

I am definately exploring many avenues as not to limit myself. Thanks again for the input, it is always appreciated. It gives me something to think about.