Review Request: Hat Trix

Don't worry so much about it Jeeves! Jeesh! (ha!)

My first impression of this is that it's really left-side heavy. It seems really unbalanced, although I'm sure it looks better at lower resolutions. You could try moving those photos along the left side to the right side of the page - that might provide more of a balance. Decide if you're going to do flexible width or fixed width - it seems odd to see the text end while the rest of the design continues. I do find the appearance of this page to be quite nice though - i particularly like what you've done with the logo.

The pictures on the other pages should be much larger. I'm finding the blue sidebar here to be a little overbearing as well. The navbar is another thing that could use some work - at least put in some hovers to make those links more interesting!

Overall I'm finding this design to be a little bit on the boring side considering the subject matter. Everything is there, and for an information-based site this would be fine, but for something creative and unusual like hat making I would expect something a little more artistic.

Yes, try moving some stuff to the right, like the navigation text or the logo :S

And try centering the credits or footer part (what ever you call it)

Some good points there. I'll change some stuff around tommorrow morning (right now I just want to have some wine! )

You need to set your background color and you shouldn't mix css in html tags (table tag - height="100px").
I notice your pages all have different width side bars, you should try keep them all the same as it's very jumpy when switching pages.
Maybe use one picture per page

I agree with Megan. I don't think the blue works for hats, I think I would try a brown in the shade of the second hat on the right. I like the image in the middle "Hat Trix" maybe your navigation should look like that.

As another log on the fire I'll mention a couple of small observations...

- Your page footer navigation has an element (Profile) that is lacking in the main navigation.

- Your site credits really should open a new window rather than pull the users away from your client's site (tsk, tsk )

Beyond that, I think Megan covered most of the bases.

Netscape 4.75
Solaris OS

Hello JeevesBond,

This was a nice straightforward commerce site and I very much liked the photos of the hat-making process. Did you intentionally select a soft-filter or was that just the effect of natural diffused lighting?

Netscape 4.75 behaves oddly under Solaris and the menu titles appeared much too small. I know that Netscape doesn't do this under other OS's. Still, the menu was readable (after I found it). I kind of liked the way the left column provided me with a second-layer of menu choices depending on which page I was on.

Adding the map was a nice touch too albeit the CGI had some problems with my browser/OS configs. That's not unusual since we have a rather finicky high-security proxy.

On the matter of aesthetics, I'll just voice my opinions and preferences and leave them just as such. The choice of a blue-themed storefront seemed to take something away from the warm-colored photography. I was thinking that a sun-gold and forest-green color theme might better compliment the hats and your photos. That might give a more "spring-and-summer" feel to the site. Again, these are just based on my tastes.

Best Regards,

- zoinks

I agree that your site is very "left" heavy. Maybe you could try centering your text so that it expands more to fill the space in higher resolution screens? Also, myabe those small photos of the hats can be thumbnails that people can click on to view a larger photo. (I would make sure that the larger photo opens in a new window.)

I agree with zoinks about the colors...sun-gold and forest-green sound very nice! The blues you chose don't do anything for me.

Otherwise i like your site a lot!

Hello all...Remember this thread? Well I did the site colour scheme etc. has been played with and I'm in the process of making the menu a little more "funky." I would quite like some feedback on the changes (mainly colour scheme) so far, please

URL again: www.hattrix.co.uk/new

Hello JeevesBond,

That much improved over the old blue colour scheme and certainly more complimentary to the photos! The sun-gold is perfect!

Perhaps you might want to try more of a deep emerald-green in lieu of the olive-green. It looks very nice as it is but it might also be nice to experiment with another scheme.

Best Regards,

- zoinks

hey JeevesBond

i think your site looks great. i really like it. a couple of minor points

1) i would make the links within the actual content underlined. this makes it more intuitive how to navigate the site
2) try validating your html http://validator.w3.org (a couple of minor problems)

James
http://www.freelancedeveloper.org

Hey, sorry I haven't been around to reply to your posts! (Have moved house and BT have taken ages to sort out our ADSL), the HTML is now valid (just don't look at the CSS!)
Also check out the new menu...I did have rollovers but they were done using CSS, they only seem to work in IE
I'll have a look at some improvements to the color scheme at some point, but for now I've got to get this uploaded!

Cheers for the help everybody! Any other comments are welcome.

Cheers, Jeeves

button text size is pretty small. The "exquisteness?" of ladies hats is lost on me, when you just show me a big rack o hats.

i feel "hat buying " should be more heavily emphasized, but then I like PT barnum marketing "HATS GET YOUR HATS HERE" "Fresh Made Hats, Have a lumpy, bumpy head? Well fix that, with a hat!"

the hat pictures should be clickable to view a larger image. women are picky, id imagine they are picky about hats.

also why the hassle over E commerce, if these hat ladies have a brick and mortar set up they can take CCs, all you need is a secure submission page and they can run the numbers on the machine. bingo bango youve got hats. -Josh

PS get the hat making ladies to smile. smiles sell -Josh

I'm not so keen on the colour scheme, the top green looks a bit muddy to me but I do like the side sage green. I also don't like the font on the footer links, hard to read and doesn't fit with the rest of the text.

I've changed the colour if you want to have another look webmistress/zoinks (If you are thinking of a deeper green I'm afraid it just doesn't fit!)

Also Josh I'm afraid the hat ladies don't smile They're lovely people, just not too willing to look happy in photos!