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Julie contacted me requesting a web review of her site. This website owner told me she also has plans to do some work on her site coming up and would love the feedback.

How this works: I will review this website on both technical and artistic properties and give each a “pear rating”. I will also include why the site got the grade it did and what things could be done to improve the site.

See how her site did after the jump

Technical:

This site is actually coded very well! Kudos to the web designer for using pretty clean code and good cross browser compatibility.
* The navigation on the site was great, it stayed the same throughout the site and no page was more than 1-2 clicks from any other page.
* There was a bit of redundant code that could have been eliminated by including it in the CSS file instead, span styles indicating font choices. Not a big deal though.
* The width is another thing to look at with this site. Right now its 1100px wide, which is a pretty wide site. For visitors that are running new computers with higher resolution settings this shouldn’t be an issue, but you are pushing it kinda close for anyone running a 1024 or 800 resolution. There would be some scrolling in either setting. The way to fix this would be to set the site so that it is a fluid width that adjusts based on screen size or set a smaller fixed width. Again, this one wasn’t a huge issue and will only affect a small portion of visitors.
* The last concern I had was the email link on the contact page. This shows a link that says “Email Me” and automatically opens a blank email in outlook/or similar pre-addressed. I understand the concern for not wanting to display the actual email link due to spam bots, but with this method those that do not use a computer based email system and choose to use gmail/yahoo or other web based email service are excluded. This means they have to open the computer based email service and copy the email address and then transfer that to their web based web service. Or, if they are tech savvy, they right click the link and look at the properties. To fix this I’d turn the “Email Me” into an actual email address or include a non-linked email address after this. Another alternative is to use a contact form instead.

Over all the technical aspects of the site are great. Very few changes I’d make to the site.

Artistic:

Visually, this site has it. The colors fit the type of products and it has a very natural feeling.
* My main concern would be the extra space located above the website, there is just too much of it! This is valuable real estate on the page that is being left blank. This is an easy fix, the designer could simply give it less top margin/padding and move the entire site up. The key is to get as much of your featured products and information above the fold, which translates to mean that you want to have it above the point of needing to scroll. Extra blank space makes for more scrolling.
* The top tab navigation could have smoother edges as well to give it a more finished look, although I understand why the designer left it the way it is. Its a bit more complicated to get a perfectly smooth edge on those tabs.
* The left side where it says “Categories” is orange. While its a nice color, it doesn’t appear anywhere else on the site and a bit out of place. This site has a great color palette and there are other colors I’d choose from before going with the orange.
* The last item: the blog. I LOVE seeing blogs included on web sites, they boast great SEO traffic and give your visitors another way to interact with the web site. I’d like to see this blog match the style of the main site and have matching navigation. You want the visitor to know right away that it is still part of the main site without poking around. The blog should also be running on the main domain instead of the IP address.

This site is a very solid site and is received 4 out of 5 pears in BOTH the technical and artistic aspects for an overall 4 pear score.

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