Please review this site and give me some feed-back.
http://www.mamasgiftstore.com
Thank you.
Carolyn Crabb


<Mod edit to comply with Site Review Rule #1 - Syren>

Please review this site.

Carolyn Crabb
http://www.mamasgiftstore.com

Glad that you have taken the step out into the World Wide Web. I will give you my unvarnished thoughts here, so please take them with an open mind.

Let me start by say my mantra to you! Be consistent, be consistent, and be consistent. Your look, colors and navigation should always be consistent! The changing background and text colors are hard on the eyes and can disorient some visitors. Black text on white is still the easiest for the vast majority of visitors.

You visually need to tell you visitors what the site is all about. You can uses you name in the header, but I would support it with some visual element on the main page at the very least. I would highly recommend that you create a color scheme, visual identity and navigational structure and religiously carry it throughout the site. For instance, if I go to the decorations page, I have to back arrow to the main page to find a link to the gifts section! To clumsy, you will loose visitors.

Check your text alignment. The candles and baby links on the main page are right aligned and the text below is left aligned. This makes the link jump way to the right on large or higher resolution screens. If also took a second to realize that they were not subsection of the links to the right, You might try putting this column into a single row and put a small image in each one to help visitor quickly identify the product category.

Talking about the same area, I never recommend that you put unbound tables on the 100% width setting. This makes it stretch a long way on a screen like mine (21” at 1152 resolution) and give control of you visual at4ructure away.

The little comment form is very irritating when it appears on every page. Try putting a FAQ section on the site to answer common questions people have asked. You can give if different sections for each product line and add to it over time. Otherwise link them to a contact/feedback page with the form on it.

You got problems with your shopping cart. The certificate is not verifiable! This will stop shoppers in their tracks. The cart also suffers from that silly shopping cart doing circles against a sorry to say horrendous background. That’s all I will say on the shopping cart.

I would recommend that you find a site that you like and that is success full and model yours after it. You don’t have to copy everything, but use it as a guide. Did not spend the time to look at the code… sorry.

I wish you the best of luck. Feel free to fire back!


You can review my website right here in this forum at http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=10000

__________________
Timothy A. Keneipp
Managing Member/Designer
TAK Designs, LLC
PO Box 418
Baker City, OR 97814
info@takdesigns.com
www.takdesigns.com
______________________

Professional design services for
web, print and branding.

you need to get a good logo... and the logo and site title should be on every page.
All of your pages should be identical, with the exception of the products, of course. Each of you pages, at present, is different making the site look amateurish instead of professional.
you should have some navigation structure that is consistent throughout the site... links on the side of the page (rather than embedded in the text) and on the bottom.. people should not have to look for the navigation.
You have to have a lot more text on your index page as to who and what you are and why anyone should buy their gifts from you. I checked your meta tags (of which you have too many - keywords should not exceed 48)... your keywords should be used in the body of your site...therefore, your meta tags will not be same on every page, due to the nature of your site.
Your "contact us" link opens in email... no where could I find anything about you... who you are, where you are from, etc... this physical information lends credibility to a site.
Just a bit more work and you could end up with a good site..

__________________
Mary Ann
Affordable Websites Designed - www.m-goret.com