SITE REVIEW: TOFA.us

This is a site I am about to finish up on the 26th of June. TOFA stands for 'Token of Appreciation' (which I designed as well as the logo). It is going to be a social community site, with a shopping solution to purchase workshops etc. The map application found on 'share your connection' is a pretty extensive Google maps application where you will have to put in the token id number, and a 2 digit security number found on the side of the coin, to hopefully limit the amount of spam and abuse it may take.

http://www.tofa.us

Site Includes:

1. Customized Zen Cart E-commerce
2. Customized Google Maps Application
3. 2 Wordpress Blogs

anyone?

you can change the background to input boxes

I love your logo and colors. One thing (could be my monitor settings) The black font on brow background was a little difficult to read. Maybe a code validation for contacts? Looks great though, wish I had this much creativity! good job

Thanks rskala, I totally agree with you in regards to the black font, but my client wants it. Originally, I had a nice lite cream font, that was easy to read. But she wanted black, so what can I do you know.

great! I like the background.. the globe at the top looks great! launch June 26th! good luck

Hey. Been looking at this since you first posted. Looks pretty good. Just a few things.
The Sponsors tab - I would leave that off until I had some..
The home page kind of looks like a splash page. I like the layout, but on first glance I kind of want to look for an "ENTER" button. That's kind of what I was trying to say above.
Colors - I like the color scheme and I understand the dark colors live with the coins. BUT this is a charity website and you need something bright in the way of color to reflect the positivity of giving. Make me happy to give and not sad about the reason I'm giving.

TEXT -Also the color combinations are not high enough contrast on some pages. A little wordy in some areas.

I do like what you did with the CSS. ANd the HTML is pretty clean also. A few validation errors. Always good to clean those up if possible.

Form - Make pop-up for this w/ java

Nothing happens when I "click on this banner..."

I like the cart. I would make the buttons a little taller

What about a rollover the items that increases the pic and gives some type of info?

The nav images you used need a little help, they look a little fuzzy. I don't know if I could trust a cart photo with my CC numbers... I would find some stocks for this...or find a nice tutorial if you are the graphic designer as well.

Logo - Return to homepage growing standard

The "workshops" and "Apparel" links only show up on one page? Consistency with navigation placement is crucial. You might want to incorporate some drop downs.

Okay. I gotta sleep. But this is a really nice start. It just needs a little polish. Great job. Good luck.

thanks for the well thought out critque zaiah. That was just wat I was looking for. Although logo home navigation is standard, the problem I was running into was that I do not want an alt tag to muddy up the image. And I absolutely loathe hot zones.

But after reading your review it came to me. Make the div display: block, and have the a:link assigned to that. I am going to make the change today.

The workshops and apparel links were just added, the client is starting to go in and play with the cart, adding items it wasn't originally made for, so I will have to modify that layout after launch(otherwise they have you working forever on the original bid, you know what I am talking about lol).

Unfortunately for myself, I have a tendency to use spry and xml for my forms, it stops those darn spammer bots, and as a result, SPRY is not W3C validated yet, so there will always be a small validation error in my code when I use it, until the consortium decides to recognize SPRY as a version of AJAX.

But again thanks for all the info, it is always nice to get a nice long critique from a new set of eyes.

Kind of lost me on this one, in regards to the cart photo and CC numbers? Are you talking about the navigation list images?

again, your alexa traffic ranking needs some work. You're ranked 7 million out of 100,000,000

good right? top 10% ....

I got to 286,000 in four months. That's the top half, of the top half percent of all websites in the universe.


The reason I speak of this is becuase there is free traffic for you once you get ranked high enough. Also, legitamacy becomes an issue when your site is poorly ranked like yours. Is tofa even a legit whatever it is?

Someone with your experience should have done better than this... Spend less time on warcraft and more time on building websites.

Cad,

I am quite aware of page ranks and ranking. And I don't have to use blackhat techniques to do it. First of all, this site, and the fscbeta site are not truely live yet, or even optimized. My site alone has a homepage rank of 4 and subpage ranks of 3.

I have a client that is top ranked in regards to search engine listing and QUALITY HITS.

And in regards to your comments about playing WoW and more time building sites, well I will put up my site design, and validation to yours any day of the week. I mean your site has no structure, no design to speak of. And you are asking me if my site is legit? I have a client that has broken 2 million in online sales in just over a year? What have you got?

Not to mention, the fscbeta site is a BETA site, the robots text is set to not be indexed at this time...hence the BETA

I like the design of the site, it's very welcoming... the background color is cool and collected, and the images are nice and happy. It also is sleek and professional.

The one thing I noticed was on the top of any page but the home page, there was a text box with an image inside of it... it made it less boring, but it was a little distracting. Otherwise, it was good.

Usability is not very good because it makes me confused and I don't get idea about what is that site. It should have clear message what it is for me in that site.

The copy has always been an issue. I am hoping that the client defines their message a little better after launch. They have a whole event planned to explain what the whole idea is. It is basically a form of social networking. If someone does something nice, or whatever, you would give them this token, they would track it on the map page, and add their story of how they got it or handed it off or whatever.

Unfortunately, like every client that says 'oh, I know how to web design' because they played with frontpage (unfortunately alot of so called professional designers as well lol)...they also think they can write good copy. I am hoping to hook them up with a copywriter after launch to help them with this.

background looks nice