opinions please

frost

Would anyone be able to give me some feedback on a site I am developing in Drupal? I'm interested in hearing about both functionality and design, both what seems to work for you and what really needs to change.
Thanks for any comments or suggestions....
www.organicguide.ie

Goodshape

Couple of very quick things before I head home for the evening...

+/- The design (layout, graphics, typeface, etc.) is hardly out of this world but it does seem quite clean and fairly functional. While it doesn't make me go "wow", it doesn't turn me away either.

+ And it doesn't look like a Drupal site, which to my mind is a major plus.

- You've got fixed-height scrolling blocks around the content... for the love of god why? I'd get rid of that. just let the page scroll naturally!

+ Overall the site seems quite functional, and quite useful.

- One thing I noticed is that there's no indication or notice given when a search returns no results... it looks as though nothing has happened at all. A simple "Sorry, we've got nothing listed in that category yet" would make a difference.

frost

Goodshape wrote: »

Couple of very quick things before I head home for the evening...

+/- The design (layout, graphics, typeface, etc.) is hardly out of this world but it does seem quite clean and fairly functional. While it doesn't make me go "wow", it doesn't turn me away either.

+ And it doesn't look like a Drupal site, which to my mind is a major plus.

- You've got fixed-height scrolling blocks around the content... for the love of god why? I'd get rid of that. just let the page scroll naturally!

+ Overall the site seems quite functional, and quite useful.

- One thing I noticed is that there's no indication or notice given when a search returns no results... it looks as though nothing has happened at all. A simple "Sorry, we've got nothing listed in that category yet" would make a difference.

Goodshape,
Thanks for taking the time to look at it. I agree the design isn't exciting. Actually what happened was that I hired a designer to do the layout & colours on paper, and his version had a much larger banner, a thicker green bar at the bottom with the sponsor logos inset into it. It had a good look, but the usable content area was so tiny it just didn't work. So the client had me do whatever necessary to get more space.

I've been doing Drupal sites for a couple of years and this is the most work I've done with theming and layouts which is why it doesn't look very Drupal-y.

You are spot on about the search thing. I had a "sorry" message but the problem was that when you first went to the page it appeared before you searched. Will have to think on that one and see if I can customise the View results better.

The fixed height scrolling content area is because it was specified by the designer, and I thought it made sense to scroll just the content but leave the other things in place. It was a bear to get that working right, and it still isn't identical in FF and IE. So I'd be happy to drop it if the client agreed, but why exactly is it better not to have the fixed size area and just let the whole page scroll?

Thanks again for your time, it's really helpful to hear feedback! If I can do the same for any of your sites (from a less experienced eye) please let me know.

colm_c

On the scrollbars -- it's usability issue, multiple scrollbars on websites confuse people, and the arrow keys/mouse scroller doesn't work as it should.

stevire

Its nice, simple and clean...

Althought I'd make a few adjustments (imo!!)

1. Put a border around the class="text-advertisement" and make for slightly lighter text.

2. I reckon there was a footer in there originally. Since you have the fixed scroll, you could improve the design by having your fixed height with a footer on each page. I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't agree with this, but just my 2c!

3. The email address may put some users off, im sure a lot of people doesn't know that it cuts down on spam. An image with an email address mailto link is known to cut down on spam too, maybe you could create an image of the email address?

mneylon

The lack of a footer looks odd

Heisenberg.

This post has been deleted.

tricky D

Firstly, on the technial side:

Dump scroll bars
Resize the sponsor logos properly
Use your style sheets to make 'the organic guide for ireland' h1 or make it a fully graphical logo
Email format needs to be more user-friendly and why is the email going to GMail and not organicguide.ie??
The category_pictures in the Find results look like jaggedy clip-art - not very good and I can't tell what half of them are supposed to mean
Organic suggests wholesome fruit, cereals, down on the farm, but there isn't any photos of these kinds of purty lil happy healthy things anywhere - compare to http://www.whyorganic.org/default.asp or http://www.theorganiccentre.ie/
And dump scroll bars
Add padding an perhaps other formatting to the secondary-ad id or one of it's child elements, whichever works best
Make a 'Get Listed' icon and use liberally on lhs perhaps in all pages
+1 put in a footer
Oh, and dump scroll bars

On the marketing/content side:
Starting at the homepage, who are your targets? producers or consumers? - can't tell easily, initially it looks like industry only, but from your search categories it looks like both. So make it obvious, split the content into the Organic Guide for Consumers and the Organic Guide for Producers and Suppliers. On the homepage, dump most of the Welcome message, most of it is pretty obvious or just the regular hyperbole. Concentrate on what the users would like to see and read more than what you want to say.
Split main content area into 2 columns, one for Suppliers and Producers and another for Consumers. Put a Search box on top of each one and a category listing below. Or split the drop-down into 2 groupings which is easier to deploy onto all pages.
Spliting into these logical groups will help avoid confusion for the user groups and also opens better opportunities for more targetted ad/sponsor tie-ups and other revenue generating methods.
Consider ways of getting more indirect (value-added in morket-speak) content in (news, articles, health tips, growing tips etc.). Be more than just another vanilla listing site.

And finally, dump the scroll bars.

hth
\r

daymobrew

body background colour is not set - a common pitfall (and one I always notice because my default background is light gray).
http://www.organicguide.ie/sites/all/themes/Zen/organic_guide_theme/print.css
Just add "background-colour: #fff;' to the body section (if you need the other sections to be transparent then make a separate body section.

frost

All,
sorry for the long silence, didn't get any notifications after the first couple.

Yes, I got the message about the scrollbars, they're gone. Email changed. Reworked some of the content and a bit of the structure.

@TrickyD & Scientist: You're right about the colours, photos etc, we've not done anything there yet, and should. Funny you should mention www.theorganiccentre.ie, which I did, and http://www.whyorganic.org, which was what the client originally wanted this site to look like.

frost

i've incorporate some of the suggestions made above, regarding layout and content. this forced me to break the originally approved design (which had a nice symmetry and balance to it and had larger space for images). so now the feedback is that the site is "too plain" and needs something: colour and/or images and/or something else to liven it up and make it more interesting.

i'm not a designer, solely a techie, so if any of you are willing to give more of your time to this and offer specific aesthetic suggestions, i would really really appreciate it. my own aesthetic is a preference for very simple clean designs, basically a focus on function. that doesn't suit a lot of people, this customer included ;-)

for maximum-impact and minimum-work, i'm thinking colour changes and the addition of some foreground and/or background images. (ie not layout changes ;-) )

thanks again for your time...

daymobrew

You are still not setting the body background-color.

heggie

frost wrote: »

i'm not a designer, solely a techie, so if any of you are willing to give more of your time to this and offer specific aesthetic suggestions.

yup, hire a designer!

frost

daymobrew wrote: »

You are still not setting the body background-color.

yes you're right. it took me 10 minutes to get the CSS change recognised in FF. I first used a hex number (#FFFFFF) and FF didn't pick it up (at least as far as Firebug was concerned), but then I changed to using "white" and it seems to be happy now.

frost

heggie wrote: »

yup, hire a designer!

actually, i did, and implemented his design, which is where we started.

since then, his layout has been ripped to shreds by the customer (who had approved the design at first), and by all the feedback I've received. for example, the scrolling content area was his.

this is the first time i've hired someone to do design for me. i did it because i recognise that design isn't my strength. but it hasn't been a fun experience. i think this particular designer is ok on paper, but just doesn't know enough about the web. i know there are good ones out there so i may try again on another project, but not this one.

heggie

yeah to be honest, there must have been some problem there, between a designer and yourself you guys should be direting the project, a designer should be implementing the ideas a person has, and not getting them to design the site themselves - this can often happen if the wrong approach is taken by an inexperienced 'designer'

frost

heggie wrote: »

yeah to be honest, there must have been some problem there, between a designer and yourself you guys should be direting the project, a designer should be implementing the ideas a person has, and not getting them to design the site themselves - this can often happen if the wrong approach is taken by an inexperienced 'designer'

well this is a drupal site, so i took his paper design and did the page templates (mix of php and html) and the css (which of course he could've done)

heggie

he should of supplied ready to be coded psd files, or possibly css/xhtml though as dev you're probably better doing that, anyways best of luck with it

frost

the client is satisfied with the new design, just a few tweaks to do.
thank you all for the feedback, i've learned something from this!