Feedback on site please

[IntroSites]

Put together a shopwindow client site with some custom mods, please give feedback good bad and ugly (errors)

Click 2 Compare (http://www.click2compare.co.uk)

Many Thanks

[ushop-online]

Bad? Nothing
Ugly? Nothing

Good? Yes!

[amarath]

Thumbs up on customisation Intro :D

will be book marking this along with some others for presentations...

[madstock]

Very nice - clean lines, great validity, and I love the mod rewrite too.

[IntroSites]

Thanks for the kind words, but please be tough! i love criticism!

My Mods:

URLS cleaner
Custom Title tags
Hot Picks on all pages
My own full caching (load a page twice to view a cached version :fast:)
Valid XHTML 1.1
Filter links below item lists
Shop logos with each item

I love this client, what shall i do next?

[madstock]

Thanks for the kind words, but please be tough! i love criticism!

The only thing that I could think of, if being ultra-critical to the point of being anally-retentive, is that the l/h navigation could be a little clearer - i.e. there is no real differential between "parent" categories and their nippers.

[karsin]

hi, very clean and nice design indeed, but i encountered this error when i clicked on adult books -- WSDL file cannot be loaded from [http://api.productserve.com/v1/ProductServeService?wsdl]

How exactly you make it so fast? i am impressed with the speed. any example on the caching method you mentioned? btw, which hosting you using?

thx

ks

[IntroSites]

Thanks, cant seem to get that error to appear myself, will keep checking.

As for the cache, all i do is put the complete page in a buffer and write it to a file, then when that page is visited it reads that file if it exists and is not too old, if not it runs the complete script.

The hosting is a dedicated server, i have about 30 sites running from it thats all.

Hosting shouldnt make much difference with the client as all the hard work is done at AW's end.

HTH

[karsin]

Hi

Thanks for reply!, I am not sure if I am getting it, any example code? Where exactly should i be modifying?

KS

[IntroSites]

the caching is similar to this http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/php/caching-output-in-php/

[karsin]

Thanks! great great help !!!

[shopper]

Hi,

Visited your site today and found that you have used all your operations quota.



Thanks, cant seem to get that error to appear myself, will keep checking.

As for the cache, all i do is put the complete page in a buffer and write it to a file, then when that page is visited it reads that file if it exists and is not too old, if not it runs the complete script.

The hosting is a dedicated server, i have about 30 sites running from it thats all.

Hosting shouldnt make much difference with the client as all the hard work is done at AW's end.

HTH

[TrafficProducer]

Put together a shopwindow client site with some custom mods, please give feedback good bad and ugly (errors)

Click 2 Compare (http://www.click2compare.co.uk)

Many Thanks


Sorry, I don't like the darkness, Maybe keep the "Searching" message.

[IntroSites]

Sorry, I don't like the darkness, Maybe keep the "Searching" message.

Thanks for the feedback, now lets have a link to your shopwindow install shall we

[Amoochi]

I really like the layout and design of the site, smooth, fast loading and easy to find everything, not to dark or light and nicely colour coordinated.

My one slight niggle would be with the title and domain name. When I read the word compare, I expect to be able to do something like Precerunner or Dealtime and actually be able to compared prices between different products, on there you can't do that, unless i'm missing out on a major feature of the script. But that is probably me just being anally-retentive with the detail and it doesn't reflect on your site as i'm sure.

The one thing I couldn't help but notice, is that you have managed to get SEO friendly links, i've been trying to achieve that, but haven't managed so far, I still struggle a little with .htaccess file building, would you be willing to share what you have done to achieve it, or point me to the right place where it has been posted, as I have looked but not managed to find it.

[IntroSites]

I really like the layout and design of the site, smooth, fast loading and easy to find everything, not to dark or light and nicely colour coordinated.

My one slight niggle would be with the title and domain name. When I read the word compare, I expect to be able to do something like Precerunner or Dealtime and actually be able to compared prices between different products, on there you can't do that, unless i'm missing out on a major feature of the script. But that is probably me just being anally-retentive with the detail and it doesn't reflect on your site as i'm sure.

The one thing I couldn't help but notice, is that you have managed to get SEO friendly links, i've been trying to achieve that, but haven't managed so far, I still struggle a little with .htaccess file building, would you be willing to share what you have done to achieve it, or point me to the right place where it has been posted, as I have looked but not managed to find it.


Thanks for your comments

The compare is to compare stores not prices but i understand what you mean, the word compare on the net does seem to mean "compare prices"

The friendly URLs are just a case of changing the current urls and rewriting in htaccess, easiest way is to have a good long read about rewrite, seems daunting to start with but its a godsend once you know it

[Vision2]

Thanks for your comments

The compare is to compare stores not prices but i understand what you mean, the word compare on the net does seem to mean "compare prices"

The friendly URLs are just a case of changing the current urls and rewriting in htaccess, easiest way is to have a good long read about rewrite, seems daunting to start with but its a godsend once you know it

I'd put a slogan under it, something along the lines of "Comparing the shops, so you don't have to!"

I'd also split the left side up, and pad it out some, at the moment it makes it look cluttered, you may also want to think about using a fluid width or dropping so much of the bordering, or alternatively give the site some more padding/spacing to let it be easier to read.

That green is a bit too light also, i'd make it darker, use a light colour (white) on top, and change the shade of blue there to something more contrasting, at the moment it's merges in your eyes :)

In your logo, you have 3 colours but only 2 of them are being used across the site, your currently using the blue as as a breaker, and the green as a split but arn't making use of the red beyond the left bordering of the hovers. If i were you i'd use the red to highlight and grab a more darker blue whilst using the red in the hover rather than the red in the logo (changing it).

You could also do with a bit more padding up top there too by the logo as its off by about 5 or 6 pixels which rides your eyes off a little and you may want to consider doing something with that area to start the site of leading down to the footer. As with most designs the header drives to the footer and the inbetween is the part that ties those both in, so you may want to reuse some styling from the header in the footer or do something more contrasting.

Just a few thoughts, I'll draw you up a jpg of what i mean if you wanna share the mod rewrite malarki :D

[IntroSites]

Thanks for your comments, i personally like the light pastel colours but each to their own i suppose.

The mod rewrite, i have not altered any hard links i just buffer the page and run a regular expression thru it to change the links, that way i dont have to worry about upgrades etc.

The regex works on the lines of:

preg_replace("/(index|category|product|goto)\.php\?([a-z]+)=([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/i","$1/$2-$3.html",$source)
its not as simple as that but its a start