SITE REVIEW: Duffy's Sales

Been awhile since I visited here, but one always remembers a good webmaster forum. (go ozzu!)

Anyway, my friend's dad recently bought a business. They already had a website, but it was geocities and just a waste of web space. So I offered to design and build a new one.

http://www.duffyssales.com/

Now they loved it, but compared to their old one, of course its going to look nice. But I was hoping to get another webmaster's opinion.

A bit about how the site is run:

Everything runs through a database. To add content to the site, you simply add a new item to the database with the page it is on, the title, the text body, and an image. Images are automatically text wrapped and the images alternate from side to side. The used items page is database driven also, with a an easy login for them to add/remove/edit any used items they have for sale.

In my opinion, the site looks good.

Things to consider would be the top of the site - in my opinion the graphic is too tall.

I would also consider adding some title tags to the links at the top of your page to help your customers understand what they're clicking and point search engines in the right direction.

Your colors are appealing, etc.

Also, in your "about you" section I might include more details about company standing with bbb, etc - all things customers want to see, as well as any pertinent experience in the industry of major staff members.

Well this site looks decent, but I personally don't feel the colors match the whole idea. Maybe use a lighter color green in both the header and bgcolor. Also I suggest you put 1px borders on the images to give definition to the images. And for the "duffyssales@chibardun.net" make that a mailto: link or something. The pictures on the site look nice though...for tractors atleast.

The W3C validator found 9 errors (not too bad) on your home page. Check them out here.

I also agree, the e-mail address at the top should be a link. I also think the menu links would look better if the entire cell had a rollover effect rather than just the link.

Overall, not bad at all. I like the whole alternating-image-alignment using PHP.

Thanks for the input every.

apostle, I never heard of title tags, but after doing some research it definitely looks like something I should be aware of and I thank you so much for pointing it out. Also I will talk to the company about the extra information. I left it up to them to provide content, but maybe now I can swing some ideas by them.

murcie, I'll give the borders a try and see if I like it any more. They do feel a little lacking now that I look at them, thank you.

spork, The w3c validator looks like something I could use in future sites. But as I looked more closely at the errors I noticed most were because of a space within an attribute. So nothing terrible and an easy fix. As far as the entire cell being a link; I was going to do images with a rollover effect, but the main links were never finalized until late in the project. So I made them a table with links so it would be easy to update as the project went on. As far as an entire table cell being a link I am unaware of how to do it.

Once again, thanks to everyone. It's much more appreciated to here it from other webmasters than my client.

Looks good. I would use more yellow and less green though as it has heavy equipment and thats the color associated with it.

Good luck

I like the layout of the site, but the green color don't blend in well.

This is not the case; the validator adds the space in its output to help show where the error is occurring. The actual cause of the error is on the line that says "Error" in bold red text.

Keeping your pages HTML or XHTML compliant will help to keep them looking the same in different browsers. To learn more about how to do this, take a look at W3Schools.com.

I'm not a huge fan of the colorscheme or header design. Try using a nicer stock photograph (http://www.istockphoto.com for example) The red definitely doesn't work well with your green, try yellow if you want your text to stand out against the green.