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Ahoy from Australia - any comments on this site?


Fun Planet

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Hi there folks,

 

First up I must say that osCommerce is amazing. I think our next child will be called osCommerce. We have spent countless hours learning so much from these forums, and have found the community to be extremely helpful.

 

We are nearly ready with our site - www.funplanet.com.au - and would love to get your thoughts, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

 

Come in and have a play, the site is not live so go nuts and order stuff as if you have lots of moolah to throw around.

 

Would be particularly interested in hearing about:

- any errors, inconsistencies, etc

- any suggestions re adding contributions

- page load times, loading in different browsers

 

Cheers! :thumbsup:

 

Michael

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Right, first off, I can see how you are going to get scammed. Your returns policy basically says if I order something from you and send it back for any reason, I can get a refund, AND you'll send me $10 voucher. So I then use that $10 voucher to order same product again, and save $10 in the process. You meanwhile have lost $10 profit, and paid for postage twice.

 

Next. Arrggghhh. Everybody does this! Why do you feel the need to give a portion of your site, for free, to PayPal? They are a big enough company, they DO NOT NEED the free advertising. Simply state you accept credit cards. You dont even need the card logos, but I get so annoyed at websites feeling they need to shout PayPal all over the place. If you insist on having it on the page, choose a subtle logo and hide it down in the footer somewhere, but seriously, you dont need it.

 

Next, your design. This is a modified osc store, but only just. It still instantly looks like an osc site. I like the buttons, and I kinda like the logo. To stop your site looking like all the rest, couple of really simple, quick and easy suggestions:

1 - pop an infobox or two into your header area. login box is an ideal one, whats new or specials are good for seo. The boxes are larger than the header area, so remove the title from the box to save a bit of space.

2 - The big blue bar across the screen below your header with the breadcrumb and account links....move it! Get the breadcrumb into the top of your main content area, blue on white background, and the account links can be added to an infobox, or made into their own infobox, or put into the header bar if you dont like the ideas I put in 1 above!!

3 - Your infoboxes on the left and right. Jazz em up a bit, or lose the header bar, just soften the lines a tad, stop it looking so damn square - your language on the site is fun; make your design fun too.

4 - big blue bar across the footer....do I need to know todays date? Nah! Get rid of that chunky bar, open the site up a bit.

 

oh, and while I remember, real nit-picking, but the blue in your infobox headers doesnt match the blue in your buttons, or your blue headline text.

 

http://www.funplanet.com.au/product_info.php?products_id=44 - is it deliberate that your sentences run into each other and are punctuated by *, or does your admin panle ignore your formatting and run it all into one? If its the latter, look in the contribs section for "wysiwyg" editors, it will make life a lot easier for you and give you real control over your product information layout.

 

I really like the fact that you have put your address into the footer, it shows openness, although this is denegrated somewhat by the fact that the address is a po box..? Also, no phone number...how do I know if I pay you that I can track you down to get my goods? Youve got to build confidence in me. (I assume ABN xxx etc is a VAT type reference and not a phone number...?)

 

All in all, you got to ask yourselves a couple of questions, as follows, accompanied by my personal opinion at this point:

 

1 - When you arrive at your site, does it feel out of place on the internet, or does it appear to be a normal ecommerce store?

 

At the moment, your store feels professional, and definitely not out of place.

 

2 - Does the site inspire confidence in you to part with cash?

Not at the moment. I get the impression of a couple of late teen males having fun selling pirated games. This is probably not the case, and the language issue is a tricky one because of your target audience, but you have to gauge your level at friendly and fun, but still serious about what you are doing. Very fine line to walk. Also the lack of phone number/PO Box thing would really put me off.

 

3 - If you didnt buy today would you make a note of the site for a later visit?

On balance, yes, I think I would. If I were in Australia, I would probably bookmark this site to see what you might have on offer next month.

 

So, from me, still some way to go on design front, but definitely a site that would grab my interest and have me looking around....

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Hi,

 

your images are far too big. this for example battlefield is nearly 80kb and it's only 150 x 214. use photoshop to change image quality.

An image of that dimension should be no more of 4/5 kb

I see you already have a contribution to reduce image size, but you must start from a much lighter image

 

If I were you I would also change the (too) electric blue of your template because it shouts a little bit too much for my tastes...

 

Cheers

Outside links in signatures are not allowed!

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Wow, what a great site! The language is really good and matches the theme. I like the way that you use gv_faq's to do your faq's. Nice organization. And, even though some of your images are large, pages load really quickly.

 

One grammatical problem: We are an online store based in Sydney that sell cool video games - shouldn't it be "sells" - the subject is really singular, isn't it (online store, not We)?

 

I do agree with Tomcat about the neon blue background, too. But, teenagers do shout a lot, so... Maybe you could have a "select mellow background" button for over 30 gamers that will tone it down (maybe ask tonystewart how to do it -- he seems to know that stuff).

 

And, your buttons are nice but they look too big for the site. And, they should probably be indexed color gif's with a transparent background - so that you don't see the white corners defining the rectangular image. I tried shrinking one down to 30 px high (rather than 40) in Photoshop and it held together ok (but not great).

 

tony

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  • 2 weeks later...

i hope you will find it constructive:

 

- i don't like the bottom image with address (footer.jpg) - the red color is too powerful, you should use it somewhere else to get attention where you really want, i believe you don't want attention of your customers in footer;

 

- change your buttons transparent color, it will look much smoother because they are really nice;

 

- try to get lost of square look of the site - change the appearance of the boxes with this contribution (http://www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions,867) and header.jpg, footer.jpg, try to make corners a little bit round and set transparency (you will need to save them in .gif format)

 

- change bank deposit and money order buttons - they dont seem to come along with the rest of the page.

 

hope i didn't assoult you and that you will found the comments useful

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