[hashstar]

Hi there,

I would really appreciate you taking a look at my website and giving me some honest feedback. I feel that it is a bit bare, but i am not sure what content, graphics or whatever i should add and where i should add them.

Any help is much appreciated.

My web site is www.organicgrowshop.co.uk

Cheers,

Matt

[D.Schuster]

hashstar, on 07 January 2012 - 02:17 PM, said:

Hi there,

I would really appreciate you taking a look at my website and giving me some honest feedback. I feel that it is a bit bare, but i am not sure what content, graphics or whatever i should add and where i should add them.

Any help is much appreciated.

My web site is www.organicgrowshop.co.uk

Cheers,

Matt

Hello Matt and welcome to the forum

First of all good choice on the colours, but have you considered using green gradients?

you might also need a header if you're going for the classic look

also make the lower bar the footer of the webpage expand thro the whole length of the page.

other then that it's a lovely site I love it especially the simplicity and speed of it.

[hashstar]

D.Schuster, on 08 January 2012 - 12:55 AM, said:

Hello Matt and welcome to the forum

First of all good choice on the colours, but have you considered using green gradients?

you might also need a header if you're going for the classic look

also make the lower bar the footer of the webpage expand thro the whole length of the page.

other then that it's a lovely site I love it especially the simplicity and speed of it.

Hey thanks for taking a look at my site D.Schuster!

How can i make the footer expand through the whole page?

I have thought about using a gradient background, just not sure how to do it??

I'll work on a header for the site today! Thanks again for looking, i really appreciate it.

Matt

[SamDavy]

Nice and clean i can see what you mean on the open spaces.

- The first thing i see is a whopping open space at the top of the page, chuck some information in their let people know first off what you are about.

- The navigation is abit bland the first thing i notice is the nice clean logo but as soon as i looked i had an image in my head of the tree having routes leading down to the left hand links.

Very nice though, simple is nice.

[seedism]

hi there

You should change the font in your product pages, the one you use looks very unprofessional.

Not all links on your wormcasting page work.

The thing that your site lacks is actual content.

You should think of adding a few pages with some more explanations and examples on your organic products.

get some images and descriptions of growers using perlite, vermiculite etc. show us plants, flowers and vegetables in clay pebbles.

You can buy some online, you really need them.

You also need a more distinct header, perhaps with a nice organic feel to it, think green.

It is a nice and simple site, but with just a few tweks it will be much better.

P.H.

[D.Schuster]

hashstar, on 08 January 2012 - 01:58 PM, said:

Hey thanks for taking a look at my site D.Schuster!

How can i make the footer expand through the whole page?

I have thought about using a gradient background, just not sure how to do it??

I'll work on a header for the site today! Thanks again for looking, i really appreciate it.

Matt

http://css-tricks.co...ckground-image/

edit a few lines and this tricks will work both for the background and the footer.

as for the header, don't just think green, think nature

good colours for nature themed websites:
Grass green, lime green any kind of bio green, never: puke green, olive green or baby poop green
sky blue, sea blue, river blue, never: dark blue, midnight blue, baby blue
wheat yellow, sun yellow
earth brown,wood brown never:poop brown

This post has been edited by D.Schuster: 09 January 2012 - 07:07 AM

[oysterdesign]

Hi,

A good start!

One of my pet hates is font-type and size overload. Try to work on your styles to minimize the amount of fonts and font sizes that you use - it will make you site look much more professional. I don't like the italic ribbon font you use in the banner - I'd probably lose that if possible.

Anna

[hashstar]

arrrgh, i can't figure out the css to make my footer image fill the screen. I did however figure out that it is not high resolution enough so now i need to redo that too

[simonkincaid]

Hi Matt,

I think the site needs a lot of work still - and normally what I'll do is work from the top down and see what I can improve on each page. So if it were me my first focus would be getting that top header looking good. I like the logo you have there

You've got a redundant

<p style="display:inline;">&nbsp;</p>

At the top of your page. If you are looking for spacing at the top use padding on the .container class

I would probably add a new div at the top of your container div, that holds both the logo and the cart, then I would find a really nice and striking image for the top of the page from istock or shutterstock, and set this using the background-image property. Make sure the logo is a png so you can use transparency.

Currently there's no h1 tag either, so I would probably put that in the same div with the title of the website. I might actually change the logo so the wording isn't in the graphic, but it's actually either done as an h1 text or it's part of the background graphic as above. Finally I would sort the basket out top right, just surround it in a div and make it rounded with a nice pastel shade so it floats over the background image.

That's what I would do with the header of the site anyway Good luck with the site !

[simonkincaid]

hashstar, on 09 January 2012 - 12:29 PM, said:

arrrgh, i can't figure out the css to make my footer image fill the screen. I did however figure out that it is not high resolution enough so now i need to redo that too

Are you trying to make the brown ground stretch all the way across the screen and all the way down to the bottom, with the grass coming out on top?

[francine87]

Hi Matt,

Nice start! But I think it might be a good idea to go back and take a look at some sites like:
CSS Design Awards & Awwwards

Mainly in terms of their design princples-in particular alignment/use of typography (there seems to be a mixture of left/center/right alignment going on which doesn't play nicely with the eye! Perhaps a personal preference but
if in doubt stick with left-alignment for everything (type wise).

I do agree with others about your choice of type (especially black text in the slideshow -which looks like Bradley Hand ITC- & the ribbon one used in the footer/logo which can make the site look a little unprofessional. I do however, love the color palette you've chosen (with the exception of the questionable brown used in the footer).

[hashstar]

Hey guys, thanks for all the great advice! So it's a consensus that the ribbon font on the banner has to go


Simonkincaid: Thanks for taking a look at my site. I am trying to make the footer image of the ground and grass stretch the full width of the screen. Do you know how i can do this?

Francine: thanks for the links!

[Logan Scales]

Hi.

Nice site so far, but I'd look at some optimisation. For the slower internet users, some of your images take a long while to load. Something I added to my site is the jQuery loader. It loads all your images pre-hand in a very stylish way to ensure your visitors get the full swing.

Also, again as others are saying, get something put into that huge white space up top.

Good luck, looking good so-far!

"Creativity is design made visible..."

[Olavi]

Webpage is simple and beautiful.

But i think, it's more beautiful when you use soft border around large images.

You can find few examples here.

Btw, is it really good idea to use flash for slideshow? Some laptop and linux people are not happy with that

You have some errors in code. You should get rid of them

This post has been edited by Olavi: 11 January 2012 - 09:58 PM

[simonkincaid]

hashstar, on 11 January 2012 - 05:07 PM, said:

Hey guys, thanks for all the great advice! So it's a consensus that the ribbon font on the banner has to go


Simonkincaid: Thanks for taking a look at my site. I am trying to make the footer image of the ground and grass stretch the full width of the screen. Do you know how i can do this?

Francine: thanks for the links!

Hi hashstar,

I think take the footer div and take it out of the main container div, so it's not restricted by the fixed width of 960px, then I *think* set the width of the footer to 100%. You'll need to make those images a whole lot wider though - like 2000px wide? That might work, I think that's the general idea though.

Simon

[hashstar]

Hey everyone,

Thanks for all the great advice! I have taken it all on board and have managed to implement a few of the suggestions in this thread. There's still a lot more id like to do though.

Can you guys take another look at the site now, it's mainly just the home page I've worked on, and give it another review and throw out some more ideas?

Cheers,

Hash

[kree8or]

I quite like it, but there is too much whitespace in the header - looks empty. Also looking at your code, why are you using spry for this? Your menus are pretty simple, could easily be done in css and if you link the css as a external file, your code wont be bloated. Also, your image slide show, think about using Jquery for this instead of flash.

[hashstar]

Hey kree8or,

Thanks for taking a look at my site. I have been updating my menu bar to a spry menu because i am adding more products now and need this added functionality.

Unfortunately i can't seem to get it to work on my template files. I have it working as i should on this page www.organicgrowshop.co.uk/email_form.php but on the other pages, when you hover the cursor over the drop down menu the sub menu does not appear!

Do you know if this is a problem with the javascript or the CSS ? I can't figure it out!