Review our website please (sports/bookmaker)

etab

We're in beta test stage of our new website. So I guess now is the time to make some changes before we go completely live late next month.

Please let me know what you think, in particular the races as one friend is confused by this, but not sure if this is just a once off.

the website is

oddball.ie

tricky D

The User Experience and biz analysis needs an awful lot of reworking.

From the top:

Colour scheme is a bit all over the place with too many unrelated colours in the swatch.

SEO needs a lot of work.

Homepage.

The title tag should be more descriptive eg. something like 'Oddball | Innovative Betting Markets | Great Odds'. 'Welcome to Oddball' is a waste of text in probably the site's most important descriptor.

You need a tagline to convey your Selling Point so that users almost immediately 'get' your proposition.

The Social Media links would be more effective using their own brand colours. The larger SM links are sometimes displayed on the left and sometimes on the right. Better to make this positioning consistent.

Search should be more prominent and right up in the top right corner. There's some cross browser issue witht the search submit button in Opera.

The horizontal nav bar should have the sports categories unless or until they can't fit in which case it needs the use the room on the left, but much further up the page. Links to items like Bonus, Competition would work better with a different treatment like a star badge. Home is unnecessary and About and Jobs are more about what you want to say about yourselves than users' needs so treat them accordingly. If you want a submenu for items like Help, make it a vertical list as users are expecting that more. I would separate Contact out of Help and put contact info in all page footers. It also isn't consistent across all pages.

Use much more contrast in your form fields and make the prompt text diappear when these fields are focussed on. For some reason which I haven't investigated the contrast is good in some other browsers.

Users would be much better served if the whole of the maincontent area had the best bets/markets displayed. The current content poorly uses this space which is prime screen real estate. Eg. the graphics are superfluous.

The pop-up menus in the same area are anti-intuitive. The arrow points down, but the panel pops up.

About Us.

The 'We' to 'You' ratio is too skewed to 'We'. Try to make it more user 'You' centric.

Some of your comments on reducing your liability don't sit well with me as a user.

Bonus/Competition.

Missing Sign Up Call to Action. They should logically be after the 'sell' content.
Email address not mailto linked in Competition.

SignUp

Asking for too much info much of it unnecessary. Date of Birth field, which is kind of unnecessary, is a pain to fill for single digit day/month info. Eg. If I'm born on 3/11/78 and put 3 in the first bit than move the prompt to the month field and start to key in 11, the first 1 goes back to the day part. This should be a select menu trio.

Actually the Sign Up form is disastrous clusterfcuk, I've wasted ages trying to get it to work, and then have to wait for a confirmation email which was not a step which was indicated in the process flow content above the form.

Betting
The Betslip fields should be revealed by default, even if empty of data.

Your app which fills out the bets is way too slow, so users are looking at no bets for too many seconds, enough time for them to bail out. Re-examine your method for populating this content.

I don't see https being used anywhere that it should be. You have to get this right before proceeding any further including during this testing phase. IMO It's seriously negligent even for dummy accounts which might use familiar passwords and usernames. On this basis alone I would be warning people not to use it at all, even in beta mode.

Provide proper and complete contact info. Name, address, phone, etc should all be prominent. You are in an industry where trust is imperative, so provide it.

Support function is missing entirely.


I could keep on going but despite it being in beta, I reckon enough has been said to show that you should have been much better served by your solution provider(s).


hth and gl

etab

Some good input, particularly on call to action etc.

Remember we are a struggling start-up....with our website just live in beta mode.

SSl certs will be there shortly.

Thanks for input.

OneIdea

At a glance... why are lotto bonus balls different odds? shouldn't they be all the same?

Horse racing listings, have it so that the user can list all the meetings for a track, not just one at time. eg: paddypower

You'll probable want to set font sizes to percentages on the home page tabs as the text over laps and its not pretty, or make the tabs bigger... Horse Racing tab looks fine.... soccer tab not so pretty, just suggesting you make them all standard... regardless of populated content, they'll fill up eventually.

Since your an Irish domain, again just suggesting.... drop the red. Was your thinking to use Green White and Orange? The design is probable the last thing on your mind at the moment, but it does need reviewing.

There are sites where you can hold a competition to have someone create a logo for you... prize money could be anything from a 5-20 dollars. Send me a PM if you'd like to know more.

On the sign up form, show a format example for Date Of Birth... I entered my year and now I cant edit it to 19year, turn of the focusing or blur whichever is causing the problem, same applies to Password.

BTW attr placeholder doesn't work on IE, however it is been introduced in to IE 10, which not a lot of people will have at the moment.

etab

Obviously are SSL is now in place for the last few days, so the original in comments in re red from first replay are no longer valid. Ironically a lot of the comments we get is that our password is too long, and this is because of increase security.


On the horse racing suggestion, it would take us away from every page to one click if we did that. We want our website to look classically simple, so would be reluctant to do that.

You are right on the sign-up password, we hadn't seen that, but have now. We have changed the DOB to make it much more user friendly, its drop down, let me know what you think. It was too difficult before, but now I think particularly the DOB works well.

I know what you mean on the colours, but afraid of getting into paddywhackery like our competitor. Its a subtle Irishness.


Thanks for the feedback, helps us shape the website.

akagaby

I believe that color scheme is in the eye of the mouseholder/smart-phoneholder/etc

What I would suggest is to take into consideration various screen sizes. You have a fixed width (targeted for wider screens). Perhaps go for a responsive layout. Users will appreciate your site more.

You may wanna consider some on-page SEO. Page description, image alt text, hierarchy of H tags etc.