Critique My New Website

[Jazznow]

Hi all,

I thought it would be good to get some critique on my new website. It's in German and I will post a link to google translator so you can understand what I'm talking about. But i think a critique on design is more important than on content.

There are no prices on the website because of some complicated law on ecommerce in Germany and there are a lot of lawyers making a living by suing people like me who make only a small mistake

Anyway the name of the website (and someday the name of my business I hope) is nordlicht-leder.de. Nordlicht is the German word for aurora borealis and can mean both the natural phenomenon and a person who is living or was born in the north of Germany.

The link to google translator is:

http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=www.nordlicht-leder.de%0A

Many greetings

Jonathan

[Cyberthrasher]

Noticed you don't have many responses yet. Those of us in the US may find it hard to recognize your web address in the name there, so I'm putting a link here for others to see it easier (hope you don't mind). I'm not sure it was clear that the translator page links to your page in a translated version.

http://www.nordlicht-leder.de

As for critique, the layout looks good for the most part. I will say that such linear pages like the home page are kind of hard on people's attention spans. It looks like you have things pretty well categorized on the left navigation menu, so it might be better to slim down the home page and place things in the dedicated pages for those types of items. I think the home page should be short and brief with a focus of driving people to the aspects of the page that they're interested in. One idea I was working on for mine was a front page slider for new items that linked to that items description on it's product page. That way if people are interested in your steampunk bag, they can click and go check out some more details, but if it's not their thing, they don't have to scroll past it to find the items they are interested in.

Do you mind me asking what you're using for an image/gallery plugin? I really like the way those are presented and I keep on vowing to finish my website someday.

Edited October 23, 2012 by Cyberthrasher

[Jazznow]

Hi,

The gallery is a plugin for joomla called nextgen. I will think about the start page. Since I am not a programmer or web designer I have to rely on what joomla allows me to do.

Best wishes

[Cyberthrasher]

Cool, I think I have that one loaded onto mine.

Overall it's still a great site. It just seems like you've duplicated a lot there by having things on both the start page and their own product pages.

[HellfireJack]

I agree on creating a start page. Joomla allows you to create a more tradition start page by moving posts on or off the index page. You can have a single artile represent your home page and make links to other pages to get to your products.

http://docs.joomla.org/Managing_the_front_page

That's a bit on Joomla's setup for the start page.

[Jazznow]

Thanks for your support. I made a stupid mistake, it's a Wordpress homepage, not joomla. My gfs homepage is made with joomla and I got a bit confused.

Anyway I Found a tutorial to make the start page static and will do this soon. Maybe I find a way to show the two or three most recent articles on this site too.

Thanks again for your help

Jonathan