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ryanfilard

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Not a fan:

 

Purple, black, and silver/gray are the colors of royalty, and, ironically, the porn industry, not of New Hampshire (I'm a resident myself, near the seacoast), nor of antiques (have you traveled down Rt. 4 at all?  it's called Antique Alley for a reason).

 

The drop down menu is useless.  The whole point of a drop down is to offer hierarchical navigation without needing to scroll.

 

Get rid of the bumpiness of the store menu.  It's distracting and out of place.

 

A whole bunch of other stuff - useless home page, unaligned forms, SQL/PHP errors for a bad GET value rather than a 404 error page, etc.  I get that it's unfinished, but it's really rough at the moment.

 

As a designer, you can't just bend to the whims of your clients.  Small business clients in particular are notorious for having horrendous design sensibilities.  Many are just excited to have any web presence at all, while others won't be happy unless their site is more gaudy than Reno.  It's your job to reign them in and stress that design is supposed to invoke certain feelings/moods/ideas while enhancing user interaction.  An antique store shouldn't have the same color palette as a porno shop.

 

In other words, it's okay to disagree with them.  If you consider yourself a professional, you should disagree with them if the design they want will undermine the purpose of the site.  You're job isn't just to spew out whatever they want, but to make the best site for them.

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I also recently did folkartdecoys.com. I am just fixing a few bugs now.

 

Colors are better (not great, but better), but, again, not a fan:

 

Why do the buttons have rounded rectangles - which alter the size of the menus - for a hover state? 

 

Why is there simply a list of photos on the main page, one of which (the second one) breaks the layout? 

 

Why are you using HTML to shrink images in the store - which causes noticeable image loading - rather than real thumbnails?

 

Why do you have centered text?  Why is your "Jump to Article" drop down not centered?

 

---

 

I get that you're an amateur, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done if you're going to market yourself as a designer.  Step one to advancing is doing homework.  Are there sites in the same domain (business) as your client's?  What do the good e-commerce sites do that is similar to one another?  What are some cool sites you can use for inspiration (hint: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/25/showcase-of-beautiful-and-fresh-ecommerce-websites/ )?

 

No one is going to expect you to make a site that looks like it belongs to a Fortune 500 company (at least, not initially).  That said, there's certainly a lot you can do to improve.  Look at what the pros do, find the commonalities between them, and try to emulate it.  You'll develop your own aesthetic over time, but you'll at least have the structural components down.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I just created a site for a client.

 

Are you doing this for free? Because your quality of your website doesn't speak "$50 per hour" as I presume many professionals charge.

 

Drop the purple background. Go with white.

Waste of space at the top. Make the logo smaller and fill the space around it.

Tabs need to change over hover. That is the only way I know they are links

Make the text smaller and use more line-height (spacing) between lines.

The yellow basket should be converted into a shopping cart. Do not reinvent the wheel; uncommon icons will go unnoticed by users.

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