New Template Review

Tees

Free Member
Jan 28, 2008
15
1
The Midlands
Hi Bill,

I agree with dave_n that there's too much white space around the logo. First impressions count and it looks a bit ameuterish compared to the rest of the site. It needs tightening-up in my view.

The site did take a long time to load. Normally I would not have waited so long and gone elsewhere. Navigation within the site was sometimes very slow too.

In my view the photos are too small on some items. When I'm browsing some shopping sites I look at the photo first to determine if I'm interested then the description. If I can't clearly see from the photo, I move on, I don't have time. And although my vision is ok, I find it tiring to look at text that is too small. People with visual impairments would likley move on. I advise on the Disability Discrimination Act, so I'm always a bit biased with font/image sizes.

Lastly, I would put the information box as a menu across the top (where you have duplicated the products). People may be looking for this and not find it down in the right hand corner.

Overall though It's a nicely laid out site. Good luck.

/Dave
 
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Also could you let me know if you think my site is slower than most sites at loading in.
The first time I visited your site it took a long time to load, then trying again later (after a browser cache clear), it didn't seem too bad, now it's running very slow again, update now it's OK again.

Intermittent times when the site loads slow could be an indication of cheap shared hosting, where there are too many websites stuffed on the same server and the server is feeling the strain at intermittent times of heavy use. This could be a bandwidth strain, a memory strain, a processor strain, or a database connection strain (probably the latter, waiting for new database connections to become available, a server will have a maximum limit of connections available, if they are taken up you have to wait). I notice you are with namesco hosting. An ecommerce site, especially a site which heavily uses a database, should never be placed on cheap mass-market shared hosting plans.

With your Zencart site, which is a derivative of osCommerce, I also noticed that you have no auto-thumbnailing feature, so all the thumbnail images you see aren't in fact small images, they are the large images which are downloaded and shrunk in the browser. This will also add to the page load times, and it will also mean that your thumbnails aren't good quality (jagged edges, pixel loss, etc). This is a common problem with osCommerce and Zencart sites, e.g. see recent post and this post, since autothumbnailing isn't a standard feature, it has to be added (a developer software integration task).

Currently though, I think your main speed problem is a hosting one.
 
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I use three size images, small, medium and large.
An example of browser shrinking can be seen with the featured product on the right of the home page (3d ballerina puzzle). The image which is downloaded and displayed is this one:

www.themagicchest.co.uk/images/Puzzle_18084.jpg

which is 150x135 pixels. It is displayed on your homepage though as 89x80 pixels, which means that it is browser shrunk (hence the drop in quality, e.g. pixel loss means you cannot make out the ballerina text on the box). With a good autothumbnailing system implemented, the site would realise before-hand that it needs to display images smaller, and the site would auto-generate separate smaller high quality versions of the images (higher quality than what is possible with browser shrink).

This issue is also present with most of your small thumbnail images, although I still think this is a minor issue compared to the hosting.
 
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