Alright, you guys know the drill! Please take a poke around this site and tell me every little detail wrong with it:
http://www.ollydog.com
It was released today... it was a redesign of an old miva site they had that was just not working out.
OllyDog critique
Moderator: General Moderators
- Kieran Huggins
- DevNet Master
- Posts: 3635
- Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2006 4:14 pm
- Location: Toronto, Canada
- Contact:
Very nice - the only criticism I can offer is the URL scheme. Seems rather unnatural to me, but I'm being exceptionally picky when I say this.
"categories" would be "products" in my world, the next segment of the URL being a filter.
"product/new/2131-21/uri-safe-name" screams out over-complicated: there are filters in the URL when there don't need to be. Is this part of a CMS? What part of the URL actually matters when you type it in? I'd stick with just a distinct URI-safe string to identify each product.
Also, the "/html/something.html" URLs bug me, but that's probably just because I'm me.
Incidentally, switching from https to http when submitting certain forms is bringing up security warnings in FF (which is scary to users).
Altogether, an awesome job. Really wicked.
"categories" would be "products" in my world, the next segment of the URL being a filter.
"product/new/2131-21/uri-safe-name" screams out over-complicated: there are filters in the URL when there don't need to be. Is this part of a CMS? What part of the URL actually matters when you type it in? I'd stick with just a distinct URI-safe string to identify each product.
Also, the "/html/something.html" URLs bug me, but that's probably just because I'm me.
Incidentally, switching from https to http when submitting certain forms is bringing up security warnings in FF (which is scary to users).
Altogether, an awesome job. Really wicked.
- I've mentioned it for every other site & I'll mention it again - it's static width. Fluid width (of course in my opinion) is a much better use of browser space. Much tougher to design for though.
- Use 1 image for the background of the navigation & change the positioning of it on mouse-over. I believe this is called using sprites. This will stop the temporary flicker when someone mouses over the first time & the background image takes a moment or two to show up.
- It may just end up being a placeholder, but make a home "Products" page so I can click on it. The word "Products" is right in the menu & immediately looks like a link, so it should be clickable.
- ...further to that, I'm thinking a slight background lightness shift on mouseover might be appropriate too - the changing of the bone colour might be a bit too subtle.
- ...and further to that, a background colour shift for the top navigation probably wouldn't hurt - even a subtle one to a really light grey.
- The "Add to cart" buttons & other custom graphic buttons don't look quite right. The font is a bit off - maybe too blurry or too big or too bold? It doesn't seem to fit in 100%.
- The title for the "Checkout" link at the top should probably read "have what you need?" rather than "got what you need?".
- The contact page should have more content in it. It really looks like just a placeholder.
- I tried to add an item to my cart & it said /store was not found
- You call it a "cart" everywhere except when I go to the cart page & the message says my "shopping basket" is empty.
- Most of your form elements are single pixel, solid borders - except for your select boxes and the buttons on the "Dealer Locater" page
- The font for the form elements is different than the Verdana font used elsewhere. This is of course a personal design decision, but I usually try to keep them the same.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
-
alex.barylski
- DevNet Evangelist
- Posts: 6267
- Joined: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:00 pm
- Location: Winnipeg
- Greenconure
- Forum Commoner
- Posts: 30
- Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2008 8:19 am
Re: OllyDog critique
https://www.ollydog.com/login - The titles for the boxes are misaligned in Safari. Fine in Firefox. (Mac OS X)
Re: OllyDog critique
This thread is 7 months old. I'm pretty sure the original poster has moved on since then.
Don't revive stale posts threads please.
Don't revive stale posts threads please.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.