My Evaluation of
Paintball-Online.com
Design
General Impression:
My first impression is that this site is, in fact, a valid e-commerce site. That seems like a small things but many users decided whether to give their financial information over to total strangers based on how their website looks. It uses an orange and blue color scheme very typical of major e-commerce websites. Gaining the trust of the customer is one of the top objectives of any website and I feel that this site accomplishes that very quickly with its design layout.
The Online-Paintball website has changed its design within the last week. I have an image of the old site that I was using for research purposes on other projects. Thus, even though I have used this website for years, it was as if I was using it for the first time. I'd say that it is usually not a good thing. However, it gives me a fresh look at the site so my predetermined beliefs are erased and I have to find navigation items as a first time user would.
Problems:
There is very little contrast between the foreground portion of the page that is the actual website and the background area to the sides. It makes it feel like their is too much white space.
In contrast to that, the actual page is cluttered. They have several different areas of their page but with very little to separate them. There is not enough white space here. I think it feels even more cluttered because of the white space on the sides.
There is a drop-down menu to shop by brand. There is horrible contrast and it doesn't look at all like where it came from or any conventional drop-down list.
Solutions:
I would change the levels of the background to make it just a few shades darker so it would be clear that there is a difference.
I would also space out the main sections of the page and darken the backround of the different sections. There is background right now but it is too light to see.
I would change the drop-down menu so the background and text color is the same as the select box it drops from. In this case, that would mean orange text with a white background.
Code Validity
Problems:
HTML Validator gives the home page 71 several warnings but no errors. It failed the W3C Markup Validator with 11 errors if validated using XHTML 4.0 Strict. However, it claims that it is 1.0. On that setting, it fails with 179 errors.
There are many pieces of elements. For instance, there are '</a>'s without '<a>'s, there are '</form>'s without '<forms>'.
Solutions:
This is something that really frustrates me is when a website has several small markup issues that are pointed out very simply by validators. It makes me wonder how much they try. I believe the solution is just to put some time into their code and going through it and removing extra pieces of elements that have no meaning. It just needs time. Much of this may be due to its recent release and may improve over the next little while.
CSS Implementation
I found the CSS file to be very well written and formatted. It was very easy to read and understand. It also Validated with W3C without any errors. When I turned off all the styles, it destroyed the look of their page in almost every aspect. When I turned off the inline styles, it had no effect.
Problems:
The CSS file was not directly linked but was embedded using an import attribute in an embedded style sheets.
There is a commented out piece of code that seems like it was originally intended to accomadate IE6 and IE7.
Most of the sizes are in pixels rather than em or percentage. The page gets bad fast when resized.
Potential Problems:
The products portion of the products page is laid out completely with markup. It could be difficult to modify in the future.
Solutions:
I would simply change the embedded statement to a link in the <html> element. That would make it easier to understand.
I would experiment with different ways to use CSS in the display of the products.
Change the sizes from px to em or %.
Usability And Accessibility
General Impression:
The change in the website design makes it a little more confusing for previous users. However, I feel like the site has been made much more accessible to the new users with this new design. It feels less cluttered (but still cluttered), the search is more prominent, the phone number is in a more conventional place, the Free Shipping Ad is somewhere noticeable, and the overall navigation feels much more like every other e-commerce site.
Problems:
Earlier today, I bought a paintball gun from this site. I bought a couple of other items and then decided to quit shopping and return to my cart. I couldn't find it. It was less then a quarter inch from the conventional location but it took me minutes to find it.
There were no titles for hyperlinks or forms and very few alts for their pictures.
Solutions:
Move the cart link and its surrounding links a little bit lower or make them feel a little less like part of the browser and more like part of the browser window.
Add titles to links and form elements and add alts to the pictures.
Conclusion
I feel like this site is successful overall. It has good presentation, the content and links work, and the navigation is simple.
