I've recently given my parent's shop website an overhaul and thought I'd ask for some advice/opinions here. From looking about I see that a lot of people maintain their own websites and even work as web designers etc.

Anyway has anyone got any thoughts on improving the usability, look etc ?

Any advice will be much appreciated
Keiran


edit// the website would be handy - www.designsonpine.com

This must be tinyk's favourite site. So much pink

No seriously, the only things I noticed / would change:
- the contrast of some text to background is rather low
- the product names aren't links, only the hearts

Looks quite nice
I agree about the contrast of the text. Or you could make the background color for the text links turn to the pink from the adress bar thingy on hover.
Also, I would go for a more contrasting color for the background. Maybe you could use some subtle diagonal stripes or something.

I think its a really nice site .Only thing as Android said...it will be better if the product names were the links and not the hearts.

Thanks for the advice guys.

@Kev
Shall take a look into the stuff you mentioned, the FrontPage stuff was done my Mum A while back she would add the content onto the site and all she knew how to use was MS FrontPage. I'd like to have some sort of MySQL system set up but I don't have the knowledge on how to output the items in PHP as I'd want them to appear. I'll hopefully find some time to go through the pages and clean up the code a bit.

Yea about the product images :P I left my Mum to stick on the copyright etc, and then she just gave me a couple of 100 images (including thumbnails) all in .gif, I haven't got the original images to do them again. I might look into seeing if I can use PHP to slap a copyright logo on the images.

Thats a good idea about the breadcrumb trail style navigation, shouldn't be too difficult to add.

Thanks again everyone for the advice, shall start working on some of the improvements ASAP

edit// there is a link to the home in the top navigation bar Kev

I thought that the design concept suited the product range, or at least my preconceptions of it :P.

I think you should establish one visual convention for links and stick to it. The text in the topbar navigation goes white on mouseover and I expected everything else to do the same but it doesn't. Personally I find that a little confusing, I like sites with established design conventions 'cos it makes it easier for me to guess what something does.

As Kev said Alt tagging your imagery and using .jpgs not .gifs would definitely be and improvement.

The shop page has one line of text in times new roman [I suspect there's a default font tag in there that you've missed]

Arial/Verdana/Helvetica may well be the world's most boring fonts but they are the web standard. I don't like Comic Sans either but then that is a matter of taste as much as anything else.

Having the heading "giftware categories page" instead of "giftware contents page" would stop it looking like there are only 4 items in the shop.

Oh yeah and on the new additions page the "bathtime" heart graphic isn't aligned with the rest.

Errr that's about all I can think of mate, hope it helps.

Cheers

Yea I'll need to dig deep then since you've pointed out another mistake, my Mum created some of the pages in FrontPage when she used to add all the content. I doubt I'll bother changing the images from .gif as now that I've taken over from my Mum on adding the content it has all be done using .jpgs. Eventually the stuff in .gif will be deleted anyway.

I'm not much of a fan of Comic Sans either so I'll change it

Yea I need to make that new additions page look nicer as well

Thanks for the help, a lot of these mistakes I hadn't even noticed

Keiran