Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

I agree with everything kathleen has said so far. Now here is my critique of your site.

It has improved from what it was but needs a bit more done to make it a bit better.

While I was writing this answer your site made firefox crash twice. (I cant believe firefox is starting to become like IE with regard to crashes).

I think it might be the java applet that is causing the problems but am not sure. Can you tell me what the java applet is for, I cant see a reason for it.

https://www.feartofaith.info/believeit.htm

While the background is nice it is a little bit distracting, why not reduce the opacity a bit more so it makes the text easier to read.

Also the image with the red writing is very had to read. You might think about making it a bit bigger.

https://www.feartofaith.info/bits.htm

The text is way to small, you have plenty of space to fill up near the bottom, please make the text a bit bigger, if you make it hard to read people will not bother with your site and move on. Remember people are LAZY on the net, they want everything NOw, they wont wait 30, 20 even 10 seconds to try and read something or for a page to load.

Also having Italic text makes it hard to read, try to avoid having it for a whole paragraph. It is ok for a couple of words but thry not to over do it.

And please remove the BLINK tag, this is really really BAD html coding, not to mention is pisses people off (but only people that use the netscape engine not IE users)

For the contact info, what is going to happen if someone doesn't have a email client configured (like me)? If I click on a link it does nothing. It would be better to set up a form for people to fill out to send you a question. If you have time and the software installed on your sever e.g. a cgi bin and php then you should be fine. It will also stop spam bots from getting your address and sending you a big pile of steaming spam.

https://www.feartofaith.info/faith.htm

Again the text is too small. You could have plenty of room if you made the banner at the top a bit smaller, or even set it up so that you can scroll it out of view and have plenty of room for your text.

For your store, it is too wide. What are people going to do if they are using a Mac? The Mac browser doesn't take up the whole screen it only uses like 800 pixels for the width. Also make sure you test it with the MAc version of IE, just because it works on the PC version does NOT mean that it is goign to work on the Mac, the two broswers use DIFFERENT rendering engines.

Also when I was using your site it said it was optimised for 1024 by 600, well i hope you realise that you lose some pixels for the border around the browser and also with the scroll bars. So if you are only going for a PC user you shouldn't make it any bigger than 1000 pixels wide and if you want to include Mac users then it shouldent be any wider than 800 pixels.

When I was viewing your store the pictures of the hat looked stretched. You should really make the pictures you want the size you need and not resize them with HTML it makes the coded cleaner and it good practice. But you are using fireworks then exporting the picture to dreamwever so I cant really fault you since it is the software's fault.

When I signed up for your store, and clicked on New Items I got an error message. I would paste it here but my browser crashed and I don't want to sign up again.

Are you planning on adding other languages? If you aren't then why have the languages button? And the same of the currencies.

I think you might want to have a look at a site that does something simlier to you in new zealand, this is there news letter.

https://www.hallensteins.co.nz/thegarage/

I really like this hat:

https://feartofaith.info/store/product_info.php?cPath=23_30&products_id=39

All and all your site is coming along very nicely, and I wish you all the luck and success with your site and business.

Make sure you TEST TEST TEST your site in EVERY different broswer and OS you can get your hands on, there is notting more anoyying than getting to a site and finding it doesnt work correctly.