[24hoursupport] Re: Need Bad Web Sites (really!)
- From: "Ron Allen" <chizotz@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: 24hoursupport@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 22:38:43 -0500
Please remember to edit replies.
Hello Joe,
>I'll bite. What's supposed to be so bad about this site? Seems no better
>or
>worse than a zillion others.
The http://www.snowdriftfarms.com site is NOT necessarily a horribly
designed web site. In fact there are several things that the designer got
right. There are also several things that my group and I thought could
stand some improvement. The idea was not to select a site that was outright
putrid, the idea was to use the skills that we're learning to improve an
existing site that just needs some help. This site seems to suit that
purpose.
My group and I thought that there was too much information, by far, on the
home page for the site. That was the first and most obvious thing we saw as
a flaw. The audience for the site is people who make their own soap and so
on and who, if the site does what it's supposed to do, will buy material
through the site. Very, very few people will make it all the way down that
long, cluttered home page and therefore won't even see many of the items
offered. The home page is not as ugly as some, in fact our whole group
generally agreed that the background is nice for the feeling it invokes,
but it is badly cluttered. It didn't escape our notice that the background
does tie in to the "snowdrift" part of the name of the site and we thought
that was kind of a nice and somewhat subtle touch (at first, a few group
members wondered what a "Christmas" scene had to do with selling
soap-making supplies). Some group members didn't much care for the jarring
red backgrounds on some of the prominent graphics in combination with the
background, though. The home page, as we see it, needs to be reduced in
scope considerably and include a well-planned, intuitive, and easily
maintainable navigation system plus maybe some different color choices.
Navigating the site brings up the issue of secondary pages. Most of the
secondary pages on this site are also way too long and cluttered On many if
not most (or even all, I haven't looked at the entire site yet) of the
secondary and tertiary pages on this site, there is no way, or at least no
obvious way, to return to the home page. Sure, users can click their "back"
buttons, but there should always be a readily available way to take the
user back to the home page or, better still, to the other secondary pages.
That allows potential customers to more easily continue shopping, and it's
a more pleasant experience for them because it makes it easier to find what
they are looking for.
We'll probably find more things to fix or at least tinker with as we go
along. Anyway, we thought that the site offered an excellent combination of
pluses and minuses that we could work with.
Ron
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