For review : Irish car ad website + Blog

[david4ie]

Hello

Site : Irishmotor.com

I first started work on this web site at the beginning of June 2006. I have not put much time or effort into the web site to date, but I am planning a large marketing campaign. The web site has has been getting a reasonable amount of traffic from search engines and I am slowly building a user database. I would be very gratefully if you could give me some professional opinions on the design and usability of the site.

I have also recently created a blog to go along with the web site
IrishMotor.com -Blog

Thank you, Dave

 

[Cormac]

The registration link looks out of place as it's purely text based and has little css formating compared to the other menu items.

The questionnaire is strange. I answered one question - 'where are you from?' - and expected it to give me the results, instead it asked me another question - 'what type of car are you looking for?' and one more. I thought it was a search feature until I answered the third question 'how did you hear about our site'? This is confusing as it can misinterpreted as a sales/search based.

I would put the search in the left sidebar on each and every page or at least a version of a search. This is more than likely going to be your most used feature so why not promote it as much as possible. Not every user is going to enter on your homepage and they may not know you have a search feature if they land via an alternative route.

Promote your Blog on your homepage. Add the RSS icon and maybe parse the latest blog posts to the index page. Add a newsletter.

Promote the latest threads from your forum on your homepage as well.

I would focus on styling the blog/forum in the same way as the main site for design consistency.

753 is a lot of LOC for your homepage. Try to convert to DIVs instead of tables and move as much JS to external pages as possible. No Doctype is used either. You have some strange meta tags there. Content and description are the only ones you really need.

The title of the pages are static across the board and isn't readable. Instead of 'Ireland's Newest irish New & Used Cars Ireland website :: New & used car ads for FREE: Main' I would go for something like 'Buy and Sell New and Used Cars on IrishMotors.com'. For a page such as - Ireland's Newest irish New & Used Cars Ireland website :: New & used car ads for FREE: Add Listing - I would give it a title page like 'Add your Car to our Sales Directory | Buy and Sell Used Cars on IrishMotors.com.

Overall I like the site. It's easy to navigate through and the content is easily available.

 

[mneylon]

The colour scheme for the blog makes it quite hard to read.

You need more contrast between the background and the text

 

[jennyrusks]

Hi Dave

I like your blog a lot, it looks very neat. As Blacknight mentioned though, it is a little bit difficult to read so maybe use a darker text (#333333 - is a good dark grey).

And as Cormac mentioned it would be a good idea to use a similar design for both the blog and the main website. I would use the style and colour from the blog on your site. I think it looks a little more professional and if you feel the grey is too much or too drab, the pictures of the cars on the website will brighten things up a bit.

Also on the blog, I would use the bright orange as the permanent colour for the title as the light orange colour looks a little washed out in all the grey.

Both the blog and the site are easy to get around. Good luck with it.

Jennifer

Digital Design Cottage: Videos Training and Tutorials in Photoshop

 

[david4ie]

Thank you all very much for you opinions, I will keep them in mind when I re-design the website,