Not Your Mama’s Cloth Diapers is a retailer of Cloth diapers, diapering accessories and a wide range of natural products. Our goal is to get as many families in cloth diapers as possible. In order to support these goals, we offer diapering solutions for almost every budget. We can get you cloth diapering for less than $70 to $500. We also offer consulting on finding the right solutions for your specific situation. We carry, as a compliment, a range of natural and organic products to help save your family’s health, money and the environment.

Sasha has requested that Web Savvy Mama do a web review of her web site so she could see where your site needed work and where it was done right!

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:

At a quick glance at the source code the first thing that popped out at me was the CSS and Javascript code, its all right in the template. To keep load times down and file sizes down these could (and should) be placed in their own files. A separate CSS and java script file that each page calls would be ideal. Most people wont see a huge difference, but those on slower internet connections will thank you for it later.

The second thing I noticed were all the tables being used for formatting. This is a huge no-no in web design. Tables should be used sparingly and instead go for < div > containers and better CSS for designing the layout.

The navigation is great! You can get to everywhere on the site from any page. The customers wont have to dig for what they want. Although, there is a LOT of navigation and that could be cut down a bit. Nothing I’d obsess over though.

All the coding does work and the site, once fully loaded, is pretty smooth.The cart and site itself works as intended, but I suspect the reason for the undesirable coding may be related to the cart software chosen for the site. The site’s negative technical aspects are all related to the basic layout coding and that is the first thing I’d suggest focusing on.

Artistic:

Love the cute logo on this site! The baby is very eye catching and customers will remember it when they think of this web site. My main concern on this site is the color palette. There are too many colors that just are not working together. I suggest cutting back on the colors and picking just 3 that work well together and use those throughout the web site.

The visual layout is nice, its easy to find everything and easy to read. This site has good use of the “Z” concept, where a visitor’s eye naturally looks.

This site is a participant in the Great Cloth Diaper Hunt, a great online scavenger hunt that WSM has participated in in the past. I think its great that she chose to use this method for advertising, but I’d suggest moving the information to somewhere that is not the header space. The header space should be reserved for things directly relating to your own site, not linking out to other sites. Sasha could fix this by having a nicely defined news section at the bottom on her page where she puts all announcements like this one. There is plenty of room at the top to display a popular featured product or make mention of a sale that’s running! This space could even be used to showcase items that will make customers want to click to the catalog.

Somewhere on the home page there should be a picture of at least one product that the website is selling, this is super easy to fix!

Over all, if the web site had a better color palette and was slightly cleaned up visually I think it would help a lot. This site has a good start and with a bit of refinement could make a statement in her desired target market!

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