Wooden Toy Shop

Junior WebHelper Joined: 16 Dec 2003 Posts: 5

Any input would be gratefully appreciated, I'm mainly concerned with speed, good search engine optimisation and ease of use, oh and attractiveness - so everything really!

URL: http://www.thelittlewoodshop.co.uk/

Thanks.

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 12:05 pm (20 years, 4 months ago)

your design looks nice and professional, which is good. the only thing I suggest is to make your HTML valid

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 1:13 pm (20 years, 4 months ago)

In terms of design I agree with Adam, couldn't fault it Very Happy

Speed should be good, as graphics are used sparingly, but effectively.

I don't know if this affects all browsers, but you might consider adding a bit of space above the logo, at present it is virtually touching the top edge of the window in my Mac OS X browsers.

From a usability point of view, your breadcrumbs behave slightly strangely...
For example in a category, we are given a link to the homepage and a link to the page we are on:
Traditional Wooden Toys > Dolls Houses

Then on an actual product page it reverts back to this, which does nothing:
Traditional Wooden Toys

It would be better if the category page was like this:
Traditional Wooden Toys > Dolls Houses

and the product page was as the category page is currently, I would say with the addition of the product name, but I can see space is an issue.

And finally congratulations on clearly displaying your postage rates - I find that one of the most frustrating things with online shops is when its either tucked away on some obscure page or you have to go through to the point of checking out before you find out.

As for search engines, certainly in terms of Google one of the best ways of getting your page ranking improved is supposedly to get you site linked to from other related websites.

Junior WebHelper Joined: 16 Dec 2003 Posts: 5

Thank you both for your helpful comments I've just cleaned up my HTML so it's 99% valid, but since I use a lot of hidden gifs to hold tables together to make my html 100% valid I would have to do a lot of empty Alts, is their a better alternative to single pixel transparent gifs?

Also I've added some space to the top-margin to fix the logo. As for the breadcrumbs I only just started working on them so they're in a bit of a mess at the moment.

Thanks again, your help is very much appreciated.

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 4:01 pm (20 years, 4 months ago)

No problem Very Happy

The top margin looks much better Smile

Posted: Wed Dec 17, 2003 4:08 pm (20 years, 4 months ago)

I'm not sure about alternatives to small transparent gifs - I'd personally use CSS for layout/spacing so it wouldn't be an issue. you could always do a search and replace in your text editor, to replace all the image tags for the gifs with new ones including the alt attribute

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

The "Christmas Delivery: Some lighter items ..." needs some padding
The site is nice and clear without too much information jumping out at you
"You're Shopping Cart Is Currently Empty" should be "Your Shopping Cart Is Currently Empty"
Linking the logo to the home page would be nice (that's the first place I clicked to try to get to the home page)
I couldn't find a link to "toy trivia" other than on the home page. Maybe you should add one to the side nav menu?

Junior WebHelper Joined: 16 Dec 2003 Posts: 5

Quote:

I'm not sure about alternatives to small transparent gifs - I'd personally use CSS for layout/spacing so it wouldn't be an issue. you could always do a search and replace in your text editor, to replace all the image tags for the gifs with new ones including the alt attribute

It wasn't the work I was worried about, I just wanted to avoid using loads of alt tags to minimise code. In terms of the CSS I'm still not confident enough using it to rely on it to much for site layout, but eventually once I work better with CSS that's what I'll be aiming for. Thanks for the suggestions.

Quote:

The "Christmas Delivery: Some lighter items ..." needs some padding

Done, Thank you.

Quote:

"You're Shopping Cart Is Currently Empty" should be "Your Shopping Cart Is Currently Empty"

I can't believe I had it like that in the first place!

Quote:

Linking the logo to the home page would be nice (that's the first place I clicked to try to get to the home page)

Done that, Thank you again.

Quote:

I couldn't find a link to "toy trivia" other than on the home page. Maybe you should add one to the side nav menu?

I'm gonna leave that as it is since I don't think the "toy trivia" page is important enough to warrant a permanent link from every page.

Also, If anyone wants a reciprocal review just let me know.