A website where college students check it out...let me know what you think??

[Collegeboox]

This website is designed for College Students to buy a subscription to the website where they can then go in and sell books between each other. The site can help kids save more than half the amount of money as they would normaly spend when compared to buying their books at the College Book Store...Also a student can make more money selling their book on the site rather then selling it back to the Book Store....Here is the link let me know what you think...

 

CollegeBooxStore.com

[KevinM1]

Not very impressive.  Looks like something from 1998.  Some thoughts/criticism.

 

Your typography choices are puzzling.  To be frank, it looks like you chose fonts that are aimed at grade school kids.  I know you were probably going for something hip/cool, but you missed the mark by a wide margin.  Font choices matter.

 

The same goes for the black background.  Again, I understand you want the site to have a certain vibe, but this just doesn't look professional.  Sites with black backgrounds can look good, but it's not usually a color used with e-commerce, classified, auction, etc. sites.

 

Your layout is sloppy.  If you're going fixed width, you should aim for 960 pixels wide.  That will let your site fit in the vast majority of browsers without having the dreaded horizontal scroll bar.

 

Howabout some graphics?  Everything is text.  There's no logo, or anything interesting to catch the eye.

 

You leave out some important information, like how much a subscription costs, how you handle bad/abusive members (if at all), how you handle bad deals (if at all), etc.  Also, you deny access to anyone to even see how your site works until they've at least subscribed for a year.  I wouldn't sign up for something like this unless I could get a feel for it.

 

Finally, a hit counter and scrolling marquee?  Really?  Ugh.

 

It looks like you spent about 15 minutes on this, tops.  It also looks like a blindingly obvious cash grab.  Hey, I get it, and I support it.  I was a college student once myself, so I understand why you'd want to tap into the market the local bookstore has cornered.  The problem is your site looks really, really bad.  You can't expect a web savvy audience like your fellow students to be impressed by something like this, especially not if you want them to give you money.

 

Take your time and do it right.  Learn how to do professional design, or hire someone who can do it for you (hint: using a table for site layout is NOT how the pros do it).  Look at it from a skeptical, cynical student's point of view.  Production values and quality of service matter.  They want a decent amount of bang for their buck.

[Collegeboox]

Nightslyr I appreciate your input...haha though I laughed as I was reading it I do appreciate you taking the time to comment on it.

 

Now I am a CE with a lot of stuff on my hands I wanted to put together a little site to possibly help out the students here at our College, and by the way the hit counter was to see how many people actually checked out the site when it was posted on facebook to see if people though it was a virus or if people really understood that I was posting a legit link on their wall. On the home page you can view the ten most recent books posted on the members area.

[vicodin]

Not bad, the only problem is there's a ton of web sites that already do this, the biggest of course, Ebay... Honestly you should not be charging for access when you first start up... build a user base first and then charge.

[ignace]

Or use another model to help you pay the bills.

[maxudaskin]

I see that you have changed the look again, even if it's a downloaded template...

 

A few questions...

 

Why would you want a hover pseudo function for your header?

Did you know that the hover pseudo doesn't work in IE before 6?

Why are you using classes for things such as the header? You should use ids. (.header vs #header and <div class="header"> vs <div id="header"> respectively). The id tag with CSS can only be used on one object in a page.

[webdevpro]

I like what you have currently.  It is nice and quiet if you know what I mean.  I think at this point though it would really help to brighten things up if you now added a contrasting color.  Perhaps a red title or something more interesting in the header - a gradient, some pictures of text books, just something to bring it to life