Design Review: Green End Store

[greenendstore]

Hey guys! Aside from being a self-taught website designer, I'm also an aspiring small business owner. The navigation is not functional right now - why create the pages now only to out-date the design in a half hour?

So, what do you think of the design as it stands? Be brutally honest.

http://www.greenendstore.com

 

[suz]

I like the crumpled paper texture and the hand drawn style heading and flower. The layout of the site is a little old fashioned but it does have appeal.

 

[starteasy]

I like the idea of the site, and a good attempt at filling the blank space on the right of the page by inserting a lens flare, although I think it is out of place.

Just two things really.

Firstly - The Text

Your text, being the same as the background it sits on, make it difficult to read. The font is also slightly oversized, IMO.

The Load Time

I have several sites hosted on American servers, and I run 1.5mb connection and rarely have any issues. I am not sure if it is my connection today, ur host or a lack of image optimisation on your site, but you're site too way too long to load.

Positives

I am easily led to the left side of the screen for finding menu options, which is a good thing. I am a little worried that I run res of 1280x800 and your site looks very large, and wonder how it would appear on 1024 or even 800 resolutions. I am also not compelled to scroll down the screen in any way. Maybe put the bottom menu secion to the right, which might help fill the gap on the right of the screen?

Overall I like it, and agree with suz, I like the paper effect. I also like the source code, looks neat. WD.

 

[greenendstore]

Thanks for your feedback

I can see what you mean about the lens flare. I'm rethinking that now.

I looked them over, and the images are pretty large files. Thanks for calling my attention to that!

Oh, and it looks terrible on 800x600... I'm going to redesign with percentage based DIVs, but should I keep it left focused? I could go with a centered content, say 55% page width or so, with navigation on each side. What do you think?

 

[suz]

Navigation on each side is probably a good idea. I personally prefer centered rather then left focused.

 

[pingeyeg]

I don't like the green theme. Too much of it. Green is good, but don't have a redundant amount of it. This could look really good. Keep at it.

 

[kiko_friendly]

Nice!

Perhaps instead of having the content in a box with the black border, you don't have it in a box (not a visible one anyhow) and you use a tan-ish background colour? This will reduce the amount of green in your site without it losing the natural feel to the site.

Aside from that, I like it!

 

[conor]

i like the site, its nice

but personally i tend to try and not use so many images in my sites.

 

[Geodun1]

Maybe you would benefit from having some horizontal drop down menus to help categorize some of the items you're selling. So far it's going good, but there are things you need to consider such as:

1. Image Optimization
Consider your viewers, Internet's getting faster but images still slow things down. You can find some nice IO tuts anywhere on the net. Google search ftw

2. Link Organization
If you have massive clusters of links here and there, people MIGHT see what they're looking for, BUT they might also want to just browse categories (drop down menus can be used here, so you can do it in real time, thus speeding up the marketing process) and you can group maybe 2-3 of your most popular items in the navigation without their own categories. To go further off that, you can add drop down menus for THOSE items that allow the user to see similar items.

3. Once you go round... well I won't use a cliche
If you're going to use one rounded box, it's generally bad practice to use a square box right under it. It adds a jagged feel to the site that you might not be going for.

Hope I helped get the thought juices running

 

[XesturgyDC]

I really like this website! As soon as you get in, it feels...well....greeny. Looks like you sell some cool hippie stuff

To the point:
The glare is a good idea, but maybe you should center out the layout a little bit.

If you like the left-focused layout style, I would recommend on making the box where the pictures of your shirts are as long as the boxes on the left. This gives the website some more symmetry. Also, since all of the other boxes are rounded, you could round off the edges on the right side.

Another good idea would be to make little images of the other products you sell, and put the images to occupy the space you made elongating the box. Then make those images link to a certain section. Maybe throw a couple "DEAL!" or "SALE!" words around the pictures. This would give your users a better perspective of the goods you are selling, and also gives them a faster way to get there.

Here's one more: Try making the words in your navigation change to a certain color and enlarge a little bit, maybe even twist slightly to one side when you mouse over. I think it is a pretty cool, whacky idea to give your website some life.

Just my two cents.

Other then that its a good looking website. Not too professional, but hey, it shouldn't look professional when you are selling that kind of stuff.

Good luck!