Website Redesign: What’s Wrong With Best Swim Wear?
We have a new site for the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” as I came across this website this weekend while I was looking for some new swim trunks: BestSwimWear.com. The first thing that stuck out to me was the out-of-date look the site had to it with the “default” link colors around the images due to borders being set up on the images. Then, when you scroll to the bottom you see that the website was designed and copyrighted in 1996. I’m willing to believe that this is how the website looked back then in 1996. Let’s begin the analysis!
The first thing that I noticed is that the main header image is predominately gray, but yet the name brand images have a shadow behind them while also having a white background around them as well. This would look more professional if it was all just white minus the shadows since the rest of the website is white.
Next, you can see that they are using a text-based navigation menu that is actually an image. There’s no rollover to these images so I’m not quite sure why they used an image. Especially since the font is just an ordinary font each user would already have on their computer. There are so many images that can capture your attention above the fold that you can actually miss their navigation and scroll right on past it. You should always make sure your users can find what they need on the website as well as be able to find the menu to click on.
We already pointed out that the images use a default blue border around them which means that they are not using any up-to-date CSS or anything. They could just update their look real simple by using CSS.
Which leads me to my last item critique. I came across this website by doing a search on Google for “mens swimsuit” and yet they only have 3 name brands to offer its male customers. However, they have 35 name brands to offer its female customers. By offering more lingerie and women’s swimsuits it’s pretty obvious that your website is not really catering towards men.
This brings a close to the series “What’s Wrong With This Website” for the time being. With SMX Advanced being today and tomorrow we’ll be posting some topics that come up from that conference. I’m sure it will be a good one!
If you’re interested in a website critique, feel free to contact Regency Interactive today at 252-428-0200!
Tags: web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesignWebsite Redesign: What Is Wrong With USB Media Company?
Hello folks! We’re back with our series on “What Is Wrong With This Website” and today we’re featuring USB Media Company. The support team at Regency Interactive came across this company when we were looking for custom USB jump drives.
Here are a few things that we don’t like about this site:
- The colors are too plain on the site; the color scheme is more like a boring doctor’s office colors rather than a high tech product’s website. Their products come in all different sizes and colors so why can’t their website?
- The company information that they provide you does not give you enough information about them. Who’s to say that this isn’t a company that just drop ships the products to you from a third party company?
- We also think their customers do not like the fact that they cannot order straight from their website. Money spent on online ordering is growing exponentially each day so why would you not provide this option to your customers?
- As a company looking at custom flash drives we were looking for some flash drives at least 8 GB in capacity and theirs seem to only go to 4 GB. Right now you can get flash drives as high as 32 GB as well as 64 GB.
- The last big thing that sticks out to us is they show you what services that they can offer you, but they don’t demonstrate the type of work that they can do you. A portfolio of custom USB jump drives that they have done in the past would be enough for a customer to look past these other flaws that their website has and order from them anyway.
- As far as SEO issues that the website has we found quite a few things there that they could improve such as title tags, their body content, link title tags and so forth.
Stay tuned tomorrow for the latest post in our series!
Tags: regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, web design, web redesign, website analysis, website design, website redesignWebsite Redesign: What Is Wrong With http://www.controlnoise.com/
Today, starts the first post in regards to our “What is Wrong With This Website” series that we will be doing at Regency Interactive. Each day we’ll pick a website that one of our team members came across here recently and we will dissect their website somewhat to point out issues on their website. First up is ControlNoise.com! Recently one of our team members at Regency was looking to soundproof one of their spare rooms so that they could turn it into a studio and came across Control Noise’s website.
Issues We Noticed
At first glance the design issues are very easy to spot. the site looks outdated with their design and it also appears that the site was designed for a display setting over 640 * 480 pixels with default link colors to go along with a boring color scheme. With today’s design methods it’s easy for websites to make their links match the site’s color scheme.
Upon further investigation you can see that the website does not work the same in Firefox as it does in Internet Explorer. You can also see that their logo does not include their company name. You have to scan to the far right to see what their company name is and that’s not good design.
Also, their links suggest that you can “search” amongst their products, but once you click on “Search By Product” all you get on the next page is a list of links for particular products. This does not allow a user to “search” through their products. It also makes their users “click” one extra time than they really need to do on the site. If they listed all of their products on the homepage then a user could find what they need quicker on the site which would help with sales conversions and so forth. The same thing goes for “Search By Application” as well.
Next, we noticed that they have pages within the website that you can only get to from certain pages of the website. This is not good for the users as it will make it harder to find certain pages. Granted, there is a sitemap on the website, but you still should make the site easier to navigate for your users.
Finally, the big turn-off about the site is their color scheme. The color is not very appealing to a user as it’s very boring. Given the choices they offer for fabric choices you would think they would know about color schemes.
These are just a few things we were able to spot on this site that we thought needed to be corrected. Believe it or not, how your website looks to your potential customers will tell them right off the bat if they are going to buy from you or not. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s website!
Tags: usability, web design, web redesign, website design, website redesign
