Please Critique New Business Site

[ESE_Soap]

We're interested in what this professional community thinks of our new website design. We would like to make the site as user friendly as possible. Our webmaster has made a number of suggestions but we would like a second, third, fourth...fifth (?) opinion.

Thanks,
ESE_Soap
www.earthsistersessentials.com

PS - Be brutal - we are new at this and are having some differences with the webmater...we just want the best user experience possible...

[Torch]

I really liked the site. Had a hard time seeing the links at the very top right of the page because they blend in with the other colors. Maybe a different link color that did not match the background would look better.
I did not care for the split navigational trees, but cannot think of a better solution than putting them on opposite sides of the page right now. You may want to add some more information on some of your products. For example, the insect repellent category, what makes these products repel insects? Need more features and benefits.

[Bennie]

The intended natural look of the site fails; it just
looks murky!

There is too much intro and not enough display of
products on the start page.

"More info" takes you to the same page as clicking
on the product. Better - put the link under the
photo of the product.

Not sure you need the large (480x640px) photos of
each product. What you do need is to lighten
up the thumbnails (50x66px) and the medium-sized
(276x368px) photos.

The font is ridiculously small!

And get rid of that flickering stuff in the background!

[St. Stephen]

okay, brain dump

0 secs click link
page begins laying out
for some reason, it seems to scroll out - first the middle, then the lower portion drops down, then the top gets filled in. it seems to take forever. if that's intentional, it's gratuitous. If it's on a slow host, go for a faster one.
If it's big graphics, optimize them.

15secs
eye goes right to
"earth sisters essentials gives you natural and organic products"
okay. perfect. I know what this site is about. whew.
Using the whole name is a bit cumbersome though.
It could say "Earth Sisters gives you..organic beauty products". The Essentials could be kept as part of the company name up top. Also "natural" doesnt mean anything... does it? I'd put in "beauty" instead so it says what KIND of products.

20 secs
Eye roves to upper right corner and wonders what postage stamps have to do with this site -does it sell stamps? stationery?
But I do like the rose petals, the warm tactile sense, the tree sketch. Nice.

25secs
Okay there it is again - "Natural" products for your "every" need. That repeats what was said below but tells me nothing. If it's for my EVERY need - I thought I saw something about soap? Wait - what kinds of products again? Is it hinting about - organic condoms and vibrators?
Hmm. I'd just drop that line and free some visual space.

Eye scans upper right and notices some impossibly teeeeny links that are way to hard to see so Im going to ignore...

30 secs
Eye scans main navigation bar.. okay, I see where to go to click now. The text in those boxes could be slightly bigger.

35secs
Eye goes to the italicized, centered "welcome letter".
Hmm. Italics are really hard to read. And man, does
that thing look loong and wordy. It's nice to know there are some heartfelt sentiments behind the site.
But I can't even skim it really... and the text is all centered, unusual. I'd keep the welcome letter to 1-2 paragraphs, 100 words tops.

40secs
Eye jumps to Featured Pages.
Okay, this looks like a bunch of useful stuff.
The links are clearly labelled and have arrows next to them.
But - why is Featured Pages with an arrow - I try to click it - it's not a link. But from the link titles, these things aren't
temporarily Featured Pages - they are permanent links.
So Featured Pages should be a different headline and not look like a link.

I scroll down and see a few products... it would be nicer to see those above the search box... the Featured Products would do better above the search box, so you dont have to hunt for example products/prices. But it's nice to see a couple examples - now I know that I'll find things in the under-$10 range that are like - soaps. So that's what it means by my "every" need.

If it was mothers' day.. I just might click another link here.

[ssw]

I liked the front page- colors are nice and well- suited. It takes a lot of time for the image to be loaded (at least it does not appear immediately) and not everyone has enough patience to wait even for 5 seconds.

[fred]

I'm shocked that nobody else picked up on that centered chancery type!

First: Chancery type is sometimes difficult to read even in the best conditions. Here it's too small and too tightly line-spaced.

Worse: Centered! Centering type does two things:
* Causes the reader to slow reading
* Focuses the reader on single lines.

Chancery is bad enough -- centered Chancery is death to readership.

Did anyone read the entire passage?

Debbie and Beth are the only thing going for this passage of boring, dry, verbiage.

* Move their picture to the TOP
* "Welcome" is enough for the intro
* Change font style to a classic serif (35% line spacing)
* Edit the message until it's no deeper than about 400 px

Now it will be a cordial read, lending a bit of 'humanization' to the pitch.

It also gives you the opportunity to make the "Featured" products a
bit larger, directly following the intro .

[Bennie]

a hidden page of text flicking off and on?
Is this a trick to fool Google?
Where does it come from?
It is very annoying!

[ESE_Soap]

Originally Posted by ssw

I liked the front page- colors are nice and well- suited. It takes a lot of time for the image to be loaded (at least it does not appear immediately) and not everyone has enough patience to wait even for 5 seconds.

Our webmaster has been begging us to have a smaller graphic and if we want the text we can have it underneith but we want the text to be "fancy". He said he can't guarentee that the text will show up "fancy" in a browser unless he makes it a graphic. I guess he is right though that it takes too long to load and we need to take out the graphic and just use normal text on the page.

ESE_Soap

[ESE_Soap]

Originally Posted by fred

I'm shocked that nobody else picked up on that centered chancery type!

First: Chancery type is sometimes difficult to read even in the best conditions. Here it's too small and too tightly line-spaced.

Worse: Centered! Centering type does two things:
* Causes the reader to slow reading
* Focuses the reader on single lines.

Chancery is bad enough -- centered Chancery is death to readership.

Did anyone read the entire passage?

Debbie and Beth are the only thing going for this passage of boring, dry, verbiage.

* Move their picture to the TOP
* "Welcome" is enough for the intro
* Change font style to a classic serif (35% line spacing)
* Edit the message until it's no deeper than about 400 px

Now it will be a cordial read, lending a bit of 'humanization' to the pitch.

It also gives you the opportunity to make the "Featured" products a
bit larger, directly following the intro .

Ok, thank you for the advice!