REVIEW REQUEST : directvdishes & outdoorsmanonline

Welcome to The Webmasters Forum DirecTV. We do ask that you review at least three other sites that are posted in the critique section. A fresh pair of eyes are always appreciated here.

I will check out your two sites in a bit.

DM

I am crusing this site and trying to help out others...
I wish I would have found this site earlier.

Great information and tons of people willing to help.

I will check out some sites and give some of my own tips... I am not a pro...but I do thnk that I do well for being self taught...
Chris.

Firstly can I just ask why you like frames so much??

Outdoorsmanonline : overall nicely done and looks good except that at 1152*864 the picture you have in the top frame repeats and all the curves you have as graphics are very blocky looking and on the current members one at the top it also looks smudged. One all the pages except the online shopping everything is left aligned but the shopping in centered/stretched and it looks odd in comparison.

DirecTvDishes : Again the top image repeats. The pictures/logo all look very blurred and over compressed. I'm not sure about this one, it looks like a magazine advert or something. I don't think I like the way some things are boxed in and others aren't as it doesn't seem to have an actual design to it. Don't center text, it's harder to read and doesn't look professional.

http://www.directvdishes.com
A very busy site (no relation ) first thing I see is two images of the same guy holding a dish, then flashing text and big red !!!offer ends soon!!!, umm ok what offer? way to much on there, the eye is lead all over the site but nothing is catching it, way to distracting. I have no idea what the product is your selling so wouldnt even know where to start. you need to settle it down a little, not so much in your face.

http://www.outdoorsmanonline.com/
in IE5 at 800x600 I have a horz and vert scroll bar in the bottom right frame, this is a very slow loading site for soe reason. If you click on a link there is no way of telling whay page your on, you need some sort of indication of the page, underline the name of the page in the left frame or something. again the top is very busy, take out the date, its not needed, do you need the cart icon etc up there? maybe just include it when they go thru the shop section. you also need a Q&A section for your shop section, do you sell/ship overseas?

I know you said you wont change the frames but for what you have and your product range you could be loosing out on potiental customers because they wont find you thru search engines, what you have is a very basic layout that could be easily done with tables. I know you wont change your mind, so am just letting you know you could be loosing out. good luck

Glad you like it here. It is good to have input from everyone in all of the sections of the forum. Ok....now for my thoughts on your sites.

Directtvdishes:
Content is ok. Looks like the site is pretty well established. Everything is fairly easy to find with clear navigation. However, in my opinion I think the home page is a bit busy and I am not crazy about all of the large text. My eyes can't seem to find a starting point. The graphics are a bit grainy looking. There are two images of the same man holding the dish on the home page. I would only use just one. Maybe do a different image in place of one of them.

outdoorsmanonline:
I am not a frames fan but this one isn't bad. Again, you have clear navigation that is easy to use. Don't particulary like the green and yellow but that is just my personal dislike. Guess it is ok for a hunting/fishing site though. On the home page in the Outdoorsman Community section, the links listed there maybe should be the same font as the rest unless you are doing it that way for a reason.? You really have a lot of content crammed in a little space. Kinda reminds me of surfing on the little bitty monitor that I used to have. *frames....opps, forgot you are not budging on that one*:D This site seems to be very informative and I am sure that the guys love it.
Nice job.

Ouch, the first site directv looks a little rough. I would get rid of the frames for sure. They actually make the site look worse since the text that I am reading fades into the navs. The site is also just too plain and too boring which makes the things that move more obnoxious. The code is not extremely bad for Pagemill which tends to bloat code. I would use stylesheets to control your fonts better and to remove the font tags and the IE only font face. I did like the way that if I typed the products.html into the browser to view the source, I was redirected to the frames page. I had to look at the source the hard way.

So you went from Pagemill to Frontpage on the Outdoorsman site. Not sure which one is worse. Again the frames are totally unneccessary. They actually decrease your ranking in search engines. Again you have the page repeat at the top which needs to be fixed. As on the other site, the code is full of font tags and stuff like align=middle instead of the proper align=center

On both sites, I would lose the frames and create a stylesheet to do all of your text formatting.

Direct TV Dishes
There is way too much going on here. Way too many different font sizes and colours, too many bits of text all over the place competing for the viewer's attention. It needs to be streamlined a lot. Also avoid centering things in general - it looks very unprofessional.

Honestly, this looks like a scam to me - one of those cases where if it looks too good to be true it must be. If you streamline your design and make it look more professional you may be able to increase your credibility substantially.

Outdoorsman Online
This is much better. Much more of a coherent design style, easier to prioritize information, and better looking overall. You've still got a little bit of extra clutter here and there, particularly on the bottom of the right sidebar and towards the bottom of the page. I would also like to see the logo get just a little bit bigger - it's kind of getting lost up there in the middle.

One other thing that no one has mentioned is the green text for the main content. I'd use black text here so that everything won't be so greeeeeen. You could leave your header text green but I would change the other.

just another penny worth of opinion.

One other thing that no one has mentioned is the green text for the main content on the Outdoorsman site. I'd use black text here so that everything won't be so greeeeeen. You could leave your header text green but I would change the other.

just another penny worth of opinion.

T didn't think there would be so many replies so quick...
but thanks...

As for the frames, I just personally like them. I know that it's harder for search engines, but I have actually done good with them.

Webmistress...
As far as the repeating at the top of the screen, how in the heck can some of you guys read the screen at such a high resolution? Anyway, that is an easy fix...

The Outdoorman Logo does looked smudged, I will have to fix that, thanks...

Also, I will change the center to left for the text on DirecTVdishes...

Busy...
The reason I did frames on the Outdoorsman Site is that there are a over 1,000 pages....you wouldn't think it by looking at it, but they are there, and the frame set helped me keep a solid navigation.
As far as the date? Is there a reason why you would get rid of it?
Let me know....

D-Master....
Thanks for the input...
I know what you are talking about on the cramming in for Outdoorsman... I could open the top and left frame which will free a ton of space...

As far as grainy images? I use photoshop 5.5 and am curious as to what resolutions are the best. I'm trying to keep image sizes low, but when I do, i loose quality? Please help me on this one.

Mairving....
I actually work with Dreamweaver on everything... I use pagemill to build the frame because it is the easiest program to do so... Front Page to work with ASP Based stuff... But 90% is Dreamweaver....
I alway's hate those pagemill tags, but I think it's funny, because some people may think that I have done roll-overs and more with page-mill..so I leave it

Hello Megan,
I will fix the logo on the Outdoorsman Site... You are the second to notice it...

As far as the DTV site, why does it look like a scam? Because it is almost free? I can charge for the dishes and make even more money... The reason we can give them away for near free, is because DirecTV kicks back money for the customers. But I will take your comments about the centering and fix it.

d-master...
my fingers are now cramped...
Would the black text stand out more? Or is it just too greeeen?

Thanks for your comments... I'm going to check other sites out from here as well.
Chris.

IMO the black would stand out more and cut down on the monotony of the green.

As for the graphics looking grainy...look at a close up of the Directv image. It looks like you optimized the stew out of it. LOL I am not an expert on graphics but you should be seeing more blue and not as many pink, red, yellow, gray and 50 dozen shades of green and blue. Maybe one of the graphic experts here can elaborate on this.
removed image
I know it is tough finding that fine line between looking good and loading fast. One thing you could do is make your logo a little better quailty and loose some of those blinking text graphics. Compromise....yea that's it!

Quote: Originally posted by DirecTV
As far as the DTV site, why does it look like a scam? Because it is almost free?

1. Because it's almost free. When you see something like that you have to wonder what the catch is.
2. When I read the terms it seems like you're looking for a lot of excuses to charge people a lot more money ($225 to be exact) - seems fishy to me.
3. Because the site does not have a professional and credible look to it - it reminds me of an infomercial and I think we all know that most of those are scams.

I'm not necessarily saying that this is a scam - just that it looks like one.

Megan,
I sat down with the owner and spoke with him about what you had said.

Even if I charged $49.00 for the dish, the chargback would still stand.

The only way to get past the chargeback is to charge full price for the reciever $295.00...the chargback is to stop people from Stealing the access cards which happens alot with DirecTV. Maybe I could clear it up more...but again, thanks for your input on that subject.

Chris.

As far as the date? Is there a reason why you would get rid of it?
Let me know....
we all have clocks on our pc's so its not needed - just because you can, doesnt mean you should ...

another bad thing with frames, and you mentioned you have thousands of pages, what if i wanted to email someone the link to, say page 567? sure i could open that frame in new window (i usually do) then send that but if the person i sent it to wanted to see more of your site they couldnt as there wouldnt be any navigation.
thought about using a database?

DirecTV-

It looks like your on the right track. I think there are a few minor changes you could make to your site without straying away from its consistency.

Yes, framesets are neat.. but consistent navigation can still be maintained without them. Framesets are too problematic and even though cool (when they work), aren't worth the hassle.

The flashing red text is very distracting. It is difficult which of the four satellite dishes to concentrate on.

The upper nav has too much information in it I think. Like what does 4 peaks home entertainment have to do w/anything?

Other then that I think the site looks clean. Good luck!