help me with your comments about my website - thanx!

malkygee

www.freeflo.biz

any comments to help me out would be gratefully appreciated

look out for forthcoming reviews in toppublications

sorry but limited products available at the moment

ride on!

malkygee

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ride on!

SoloHiker

OK, I'll bite...

1. Loose the matte/paper background; center the page and get rid of the heavy black border
2. Bottom nav bar: you're changing font sizes on a mouseover, and the color goes to grey. Both are bad...
3. Not quite sure what your color scheme is... earth-tones?
4. Use a style sheet: you have three different links that ALL do different things on mouseovers
5. The registry at the bottom should all be the same size fonts; make it the same physical size as your bottom navbar (again, stylesheets will make it a LOT easier to work with)
6. javascript error(s) on brakes.htm

I've got more, but I don't want to be a nasty... If you'd like some help with this just let me know; I do this kinda stuff for a living (no, really, I get paid to build web applications!). My email is in my profile.

Jim

Some fantastic looking kit there. Looks like you've got good products.

Here are some comments on the site...

Be wary of using colours that don't provide contrast. One out of five men are colour blind, one out of twenty women. They won't see black on red. Many will also have trouble with the green writing on grey highlight. Many people will be viewing on crappy screens like the early notebook screens, and contrast will be a problem even for those of us with good eyesight.

Remember that the most important real estate on any page is what you can see without scrolling. Many people (yes, even cyclists) are too lazy to scroll. Sad but true, it's been proven again and again through usability testing on websites. Think about capturing that valuable real estate with your most essential info -- ie that which tells you about the site or invites you to delve further.

I like your blurb at the beginning of the site. Many sites forget to tell you who the hell they are and what they're doing. As with all writing, you have to keep a keen eye on redundancy, cutting away until you have only the words you need. (This is especially true on the web.) You might like to chop "Here at Freeflo our aim is to..." Less is more. (I know it seems stupid and petty but cutting redundancy is necessary. As Steve Krug says, 'Halve the number of words and then halve them again.' Same goes for images, style, layout etc. Don't give the web user anything that might distract or mislead.)

In general, assume everything has to be a no brainer. For instance, the word 'freeflo' is highlighted and I mouse-over and find out it's an email link. In the web world, we don't make people work that hard. Even nano-seconds of thought, if accumulated over several such obstables, can cause a web user to go elsewhere. Sad but true, the same dude who'll dig jumps all day won't make an effort when he/she is web browsing.

If you concentrate on making web use a no brainer, and using your most valuable real estate, then you can't go too far wrong. You have some great products there, just don't make people do any work finding them.

Hope this helps.

James.

PS: Please check out http://jamesdp.customer.netspace.net.au/

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www.techprecision.com.au