Hey guys,

Here's another one for you lot to look at,
looking forward to your opinions.

Flavours Food Store - Dublin based delicatessen

thanks,

Matt

Not bad! Few points to make:

- I'm on a 1280x1024 resolution and the logo is way off to the far left while the content section is fixed width in the centre of the page. Might be better to position the logo above the top left corner of the content? Just looks all alone out there on the left. Looks ok at 1024x768 but you got to consider other resolutions.

- jpg's for images that only contain words is wrong. This is probably the very first lesson I learned when designing sites. If you have less than 256 colours in an image, use a gif or even png if it's more, especially if you don't want pixelation around your words. Look closely at your "welcome to flavours" image and the nav images on the right on the home page. They all have pixelation around them. You should only use jpg's for photos really and try use png other than that, for gradients, text images, etc. Export those as gif or png and they will look a lot better and probably be smaller in size.

- Main navigation: I'd give a little more padding top and bottom of the navigation text. Just makes it stand out a bit more. I'd also make the rollover have an orange/yellow gradient. Actually, why the need to have a top navigation and a side navigation that do the exact same thing? One will do! Personally, I'd rearrange the nav order to: Home, About Us, History, Catering, Menu, Online Ordering, Location, Contact Us. This is a common order of pages and one that most users are used to. You're not doing this but I hate when websites don't have the home page link on the left and the contact us link on the right. There is a predefined order established for a reason: it is so the user doesn't have to think. If they have to think, they'll leave!!!

- Menu page: you need some padding between the columns. Give a little break between the edges of the columns and the text. Also, make the headings stand out a bit more and a bit of line height (150%) mightn't hurt it either. Spread it out a bit more. The price could get a different colour to make it stand out too and maybe a line between each item/section to break it up?

- Catering page: I think you need a bit more text here about the types of catering that is offered. Only then can you really invite the user to enter their details and do so in a way that says "if you are interested in these catering services, please provide us with your details and we will contact you as soon as possible to discuss your requirements in more detail" or the likes. "Please fill out the form below for more information" doesn't do that. This "more information" is what should be on this page and if they like what they see, they should be able to contact.

- Locations: Maybe zoom out the map level a little. I usually use the zoom level of 4. It gives enough of the surroundings to get your bearings as well as enough detail of the street level. Being fully zoomed in like that, I had to zoom out 4 times to work out where they were located.

- Left hand images: some are black and white, while others are colour. I'd try and keep them all colour if possible. There is enough grey in the site and the colour images brighten it up a bit. You need to be consistent.

- No Page Headers: No page has a header to tell me what page I'm on. Think you'll need a few h1 tags in there with the page name in them.

- Contact Us: stating the obvious here but you don't have the contact details in the main content area. I know you have them in the footer but if the user had seem them there, they wouldn't be looking for them on the contact us page.

- Live Site? Should you have the site live even though you have loads of lorem ipsum throughout? It's easy enough to hide the site from search engines and potential customers but still allow people in to look at it like us and yourself. The site is in asp so if you want a bit of code to drop into your pages that'll do this, let me know and I'll send you over some.

- Form validation: I just submitted the form and there was no validation done on it so I got an asp error. You need server side validation for processing the information entered. And watch out for XSS attacks. When you write back user inputted information to a page you need to htmlencode it so that it doesn't allow hackers in. I just played with your form a little and got some access. I don't want to scare you, just highlight it to you. Have a look at XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet for more information. To see what I'm talking about, copy the code below into your subject field in your feedback form on your contact us page:

This isn't malicious but it could be if someone wanted it to be. Look up htmlencode in asp which will encode the inputted text before writing it to the page so this won't happen. Ask me more if you want.

- You're actual code.... my eyes, they burn... too many tables!!! Build*Your*Own Web*Site The*Right*Way Using*HTML*&*CSS - SitePoint Books With the right book, anyone can design using css instead of tables. Seriously consider looking into it. You also might want to look at validation and accessibility but if you get css design down to a tee, these come naturally from there!

- Image Rollovers: I see you are using Dreamweaver generated code to do your image rollovers. Here's a neat way of doing the exact same thing that has some great benefits. CSS Rollover Background Images - Fast Rollovers Without Preload [1] explains it nicely. It doesn't use javascript and it doesn't need to pre load, which avoids the little half second delay between mousing over and the rollover image appearing.



Sorry, I hope you don't take all that as negative feedback but more as constructive criticism. I've seen a lot worse out there. I don't know your skill level or background but was just trying to give you some good tips on how to make it better. On a plus side, it's a nice enough site. It's not fantastic but it's not crap either. You're in the middle there somewhere and it's very good, depending on your skill level.

Keep it up! Nice job so far!

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David Behan
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I just realised how much I wrote and how long I was writing for. I hope it's not boring reading. It's my 2,222 cents worth anyway!

Yes you wrote so much you haven't left space for anybody to place their comment. Nice one.

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Are you offended louie! Did I miss anything?

offended - no. the reason I added "Nice One" at the end.

Oh, I saved you the bother!

It's offline now

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try contact.asp

@davidbehan:

did a quick job on it tonight...

here's the new template,
Flavours Food Store - Dublin based delicatessen

also fixed that xss vunerability on the other pages but want you to have a look before i proceed replacing the pages.