SITE REVIEW: www.egaragesales.com.au

Hi All,

I guess this is my chance to be flamed, criticised or recognised all in one.

The site below was created in conjunction with a friend of mine - he created the aesthetics and design and I did the backend ASP programming. It took us a good 6 months to fully complete. But now the real work starts – marketing!

It's a website dedicated to Australian Garage Sales.

Any comments/feedback would be appreciated.

Site address ---> www.egaragesales.com.au

Cheers
George

Beautiful site. Just wonderful.

Hey guys,
I am the friend in mention. I concentrated mainly on the aesthetics as already said. I too am interested in comments / feedback.

Those 6 months we spent sitting in the most cramped and uncomfortable office ever. It was certainly very testing. There were times when we actually turned on each other.

But I think the end result makes it all worth while.

RJ

Hey Raze...you signed up...nice work!

Yes its true ppl - ramone_johnny is the man responsible for all graphics.

Raze, take a look around the site - its a huge resource of great tips, hints and invaluable information.

PS...yes, those were testing times.....but then again, Noah didn't exactly build and fill the ARK without a few backhands to some goats and sheep!

No pressure, no diamonds is how I'll sum it up.

6 months well spent..Nice site!

Great job, the two of you. All things considered its fantastic in terms of design and functionality for the purpose of the site.

I like the fact that the site presents a kind but professional look and feel, making me establish some trust, initially, with your business. A feat not easy whatsoever with online businesses.

Once again, great job.

Thanks for the encouraging comments everyone. To add, this was my first site, with no formal training in graphic design or web contstruction.

George, you're right, this site is a wealth of information.

"There's no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs"

RJ

By the way, it was a pleasure working with you on this George. Some memorable moments indeed....

1. Having to listen to your mp3 playlist. I mean seriously, how many times did I hear "Every little bit hurts" by Shirl????
2. Yugoslavian sweets. Very delish!
3. That poo smell in the office! Fix those drains man, I think theyre blocked!!!
4. Loading my car with pc, monitor, speakers, keyboards mice and various other computer equipment out front of your house at 1am.
5. Ultravox by Vienna. OOOOOOH Viennaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!

These by no means will probably mean much to anyone reading. Its just that when you put in 6-7 hours a day on top of a full time job you go loopy!

RJ

RESPECTAAHHH!!

Looks really nice...and maybe some ppl dont agree, but for some reason i think it would little bit better if there was a sliver of white space above the top banner. Right now it looks as though the banner is being cut off a bit. MAybe that is the desired effect. Either case it looks great

Very professional looking site. Easy to navigate. I think that idea would work well in England where Car Boot Sales are very popular.

Ashes, fawh, mr_darek, cinfinity and Funk Doc - thanks for your positive comments.

Cinfinity - I'll pass your suggestion onto Ramone to see what he thinks. Cheers!

Funk Doc - you make a good point. We have thought about implementing/tailoring the site to other countries and the UK was one of them. But at the moment it really comes down to finding the time. We both work, it was a stressful project and the enthusiasm needs to be found again.

Interestingly, the site was originally developed for the United States (http://www.trashandtreasure.net) but after consulting with an Internet Marketing business here in Australia, we were advised (quite sensibly) to customise the site for the Aussie market, as offline marketing (as opposed to online) was thought to be the key to increasing the sites popularity. Though in hindsight and 6 months down the road, I'm not so sure now - I think it matters little which country/audience you target your idea too, as a successful online marketing campaign would translate across physical boundaries and reap benefits outweighing all offline efforts combined. In essence, the power of the net is immeasurable.

As Ashes sad: "Beautiful site. Just wonderful."

This is a really great site. Good work guys

- Eye pleasing
-Fast loading
- Great esthetics
- User-Friendly


Found a couple of things though:

1- On this page http://www.egaragesales.com.au/egarages ... gsales.asp, you've got a "&nbsp" that is visible to the viewer, you forgot to add the semi colon in both listings.

2- "Tell a Friend" link takes us back to the main page? Wouldn't it make more sense to link it to an email form? It could confuse some visitors.

Just out of curiosity how come you've got your entire site within a folder called egaragesales? Why not drop them directly in the parent folder? Seems redundant to me to have a site
http://www.egaragesales.com.au/egaragesales/URL.asp when you could just http://www.egaragesales.com.au/URL.asp?

Otherwise it's a superb site keep up the great work guys it's wonderful!

Actually I was just going to post exactly what flavah said for the critique, so I'll just skip that and say good job!

Good question 613flavah.

For sake of organisation (and habit) each time I start a new site I create a folder off wwwroot (eg wwwroot/mysite) on my local machine and place my entire site files there. Then when I reference any object (link, page, gif, whatever) I do it using a virtual path (eg //localhost/mysite/index.asp). I guess I’m used to doing it this way as when your playing with half a dozen sites at once it keeps everything organised. Then, when the site is finished and I want it to go live on the net, all I do is upload the folder to my web server, set the proper permissions and off we go – hence why you see folder name in the URL, which is merely a carry-over from the way it was developed locally.

Another thing, encapsulating sites in their own folders like this helps when you want to share the same server space with 2 or more sites. So say I have two domains registered (eg http://www.classiccars.com and http://www.egerageslaes.com.au) and they point to the same Name Server (some IP address), and each of these sites are contained within their own folders, classiccars and egaragesales, respectively. Then all I have to do is create a default.asp file off wwwroot on the web server (which is merely your own virtual wwwroot that your host has set up for you) with the following code:

<%
dim strServer
strServer = ucase(Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_HOST"))

If Instr(1,strServer,"egaragesales") Then
response.redirect ("./egaragesales/index.asp")
else
response.redirect ("./classiccars/index.asp")
end if%>

and there you have it – the ability to share the same hosting package and space with multiple sites, and therefore, really, save myself a bit of money (as opposed to paying for a separate hosting package for each individual site).

Make sense? I apologise if I haven’t used quite the correct words to express myself, but the gist of my message is there.

However, given all of this, I do agree with you 613flavah – http://www.egeragesales.com/index.asp looks much better than http://www.egaragesales.com.au/egaragesales/index.asp.

Also, I could not find the &nbsp you mention. Where is it appearing precisely?

Thanks for your comments and positive input.