Website Critiques Please

[Sam.]

Hello everyone, I have recently started working for a company doing basic design and graphics, they asked me to refresh their website. I have had a go, and since they wanted a blog, I have essentially created a WordPress skin.

What do you think? I quite like the basics, but it doesn't look very exciting, at least to my tired eyes. It is for a Farm Shop in the UK, which sells fresh fruit and vegetables as well as lots of Deli produce, expensive wines and champagnes, luxury chocolate, flowers. Sort of an aspirational grocery store. Any Suggestions?

http://www.theholliesfarmshop.co.uk/

EDIT: Should also clarify, the idea was that the four "sub" sites were for four different sides of the business, united by similar design styles and the top bar. Is that clear?

[poltergeist]

On my end here, in Chrome, the text on the "Notes from the Farm Shop" bit isn't aligned with the lines on the notepad background. You should look into that.

Also, the images in the blog portion of the Farm Shop bit would look better if they weren't aligned to the left (by default) and if they had some sort of border. You have all these borders around the site so the images look kind of awkward without them. Experiment with the colours (a simple grey should work) and line thickness.

The "Concept Cafe" portion looks great, as well as the "Caravan Park" and the "Lodges".

Overall, I really like the design. It's simple and it's sharp. Great job!

[Anian]

I'd put Contact either as a link at the top or on the side cell or div, so it's clearly visible. Also would put the icons for facebook and twitter somewhere near the top.

The text parts seem a bit unsed, try making the text align justify and also try placing the images next to the text and not under, so the posts don't seem so empty.

[Wersus]

I don't know if the code is included in this conversation but...

I don't like it that the top bar follows the scrolling. It takes too much room from the main page. For example with 1024x768 resolution you can barely fit the top image of 'Eating' to a single screen. Also frames are bad and there's a lot of definitions on the HTML side that could/should be made in the CSS file. But I think the pages look quite nice.

[barefoot]

Hi

'Frames' went out in the late 90's.. I often found that during searches only 1 main Frame came up, unless you do a 'body onload' script to load a whole page with the 2 Frames.

As Wersus mentioned, CSS is a good idea and gives you control on text and stuff throughout the site through just 1 file.

I have not looked the whole site over.

It does look a little template like but thats fine..

regards
barefoot

[Ryan Timothy B]

'Frames' went out in the late 90's..

And BMP images on webpages died a lot earlier (or was NEVER used). Leaves me wondering why you have a BMP avatar; which by the way is half a MB.


And yeah, lose the frames.
It also kinda bugs me that you have the lined paper as the background image, but the text doesn't line up properly. It looks more like a recipe than anything else when it's on lined paper.

[Darth Mandarb]

I think framesets, while maybe "out of fashion" as it were, still are very valid if used right.  In this case they are used right.  My main problem with them is that the bottom (content) area is forced to have a horizontal scrollbar if a vertical one is necessary.  I haven't used frames in YEARS but there might be a way around that, but I can't remember.

Having said all that ... I still feel this could use just a little tweaking (just a bit).



I felt that the header (as you have it) wasn't really a "part" of each site so it felt out of place at the top.  I moved it down to a fixed footer (meaning it will never move as the site(s) scroll up/down under it).  It'll necessitate putting some negative space on the bottom of each page to "push" the content up so the last of the content isn't hidden below the fixed footer.  Also, if you plan to support IE7 you'll have to use some javascript to keep the footer positioned at the bottom as IE only figured out fixed positioning in v8 (pathetic browser).

I also restructured the content to condense it a bit.  I have a very large resolution and it felt too spaced out even on my screen.  So people with lower resolutions would be scrolling for hours  

I really like what you started here and my initial reaction wasn't one of "oh this could be fixed" so that's a good thing!  I just figured I'd drop my ideas and see if they were of any value!

If so, here's the dev file (2.4mb PSD), if you want it!

Hope it helps!

[Wersus]

I think framesets, while maybe "out of fashion" as it were, still are very valid if used right.  In this case they are used right.

They aren't out of fashion, they are outdated. For example this site is not accessible with my phone (Nokia XpressMusic, which has a pretty good browser) just because it uses frames. If you just think "well, use a real computer", how about people who use aided browsers. For example people who have problems with their eyesight and use a special browser that reads the text on the screen won't be able to use this site.

Also if I want to send the link to the food menus to a friend, I can't. I have to send the main link and tell him where to click. But hey, I can just print the menu page and give it to my friend when I see him, right? Nope. Okay, well I'll just bookmark that page and show it to my friend when he comes over. No sorry, frames prevent that too. Frames are also unfriendly to search engines, which isn't a good thing for businesses.

In very rare cases frames can provide something that other ways would struggle with, but in these cases it should be accepted that you are damaging the usability of the site. Btw, these special cases are not public websites. In this case (http://www.theholliesfarmshop.co.uk) we are talking about something that is very simple to do in other ways, so there is no real need for frames and thus they shouldn't be used.

[Sam.]

A little explanation, the way this website has been built is that I have created the look of the website, the sections and whatnot in photoshop, and then passed them onto a web developer who returns with the site looking and working as I expected. What exactly do I need him to change? The frames to CSS?

[Darth Mandarb]

Yeah ... that was supposed to say "aren't" used right.

However, out-dated or not, they do still have validity.  Not so much in "public" websites (as this would be) where things like external linking and SEO come in to play.  The web isn't limited to only public websites however and there are still many places where frame-sets are useful and valid.

@ Sam, you probably should have him remove the frame-set if those things (linking, bookmarks, SEO) are important which, given the content you're providing, I would have to assume they are.  You could keep the header as you have it but use the methodology I suggested (as a footer).

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Check your grammar and sentences again, Sam.  I noticed a few issues on a casual pass:

1.  'The on site shop is one like no other' -> (do they mean on-site as in on location, or online?  'is one like no other' should be 'is unlike any other' or 'is one of a kind', etc.).  

2.  'With a heritage in farming, we always believe that good food should be tasty,of the highest quality and, wherever possible come [from] fresh local producers.'


Also, some of those breakfast items sound delicious.