Hi everyone,

I'm lauching coomparison.ie on the 1st Novemebr and am wondering if anyone could give me any feedback. The backend is pretty much complete, but I would appreciate anyones comments on the deisgn, or improvements to the site in any way.

As the index file is currently just holding the launch page, you can access the site here: Comparison.ie - Irish Comparison Shopping

Thanks alot,

Craig.

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Love the way this forum turned the URL that i typed into a link with the page title. Never seen that before.

Its always the simple things that impress most as they say.

Needs a lot of work. When no results are return, there is not message to say so.
Two search forms? Why?

I like the logo.

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Craig, few things spring to mind...

1. The light to dark background just doesn't look good to me at all. Especially with the heavy border on the content box and the very narrow margins on the side

2. as mentioned ... the margins need looking at

3. the content box itself needs more work overall. there's too much blue in my opinion and the text sizes should be checked, I don't see why the bottom links need to be so big.

4. there's nothing specific which draws the attention, it's too bright and there's not enough contrast in my opinion. Maybe make the logo bigger, smarten up the search box and change some colours.

That's my 2c anyway.

(checked on WinXP/Firefox 2.0)

Hi Louie,

Thanks for the reply. No 1. on my list is to give a message when no results are returned, that should be up and running by the end of the night hopefully. The 2nd search form is supposed to refine results, but I've just re tested it and think t needs some tinkering, that needs to be an AND, rather than an OR keyword, if that makes sense. I have changed the heading to 'Refine Search', whihc should hopefully make more sense.

I just changed it to all light, but it looks a bit naff, so I'm going to change that back. Will probably change the homepage and might get rid of the fading bit altogether, although I quite liked it, but colours have never been my strong point!!

Yeah, I like Blue sadly, but like I say, colours arne't my strong point. The links will shrink, thats just how they came when the site was handed over to me.

Thanks for your input guys, and any other would be appreciated.

Craig.

Nice logo

The URLs are getting a bit screwed up due to the ampersands for some of the categories, which may have a knockon effect for SEO

The page titles are too generic - if you could put the category name into the title tag it would probably help

Is that all custom code or are you using a script? Just curious

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What I would do (although I'm not a designer) is to get rid of the border and the white background and go for a simple transition background, light to dark but not so dark this time.

It's a mod for vbulletin (see footer for details)

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Hi Michele,

Is it possibel you could give me an example URL. I may do a mod_rewrite to make it a bit more SE friendly with no messy URLS.

Its custom code. I was offered an 'Off the shelf' solution, but the code appeared sloppy, and the whole solution was overwhelming. It had 'too much' if that makes sense.

I still don't like the refine search. A drop down menu will probably work better with the brands and other filter you can have.

I'll say nothing about colours, cause I am brutal at it as well. My partner helps me with that.
You should try script to get the image size and if null don't show it, cause it looks terrible when the X red mark shows.

You give the message "no products matching" but you still show the paging below and the sorting above.

Some P&P: €0.00 are 0.00 and shouldn't be seen by public.
can't say anymore cause it shows a php error: it works now.

you define the style in the stylesheet:

but you also have those tags in the source page.

menuFooter style.
I'll change that to