Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Critique . / . 9803 Reviews Index . / . Barber Brothers
| WDR Staff: Barber Brothers was our most popular site for March, reviewed by several dozen surfers. _ They all tended to agree on the points made by the reviews you see at right. _ This site provides a wealth of info, and a good feeling for auto shoppers. _ We did have a problem with the 'intro' page, animations that were too fast, and the lack of well defined ALT tags for the graphics. We always do a surf with graphics off just to proof out the approach and feeling for visitors who regularly surf with graphics off. _ We feel a search engine would greatly enhance this site's usability, and would like to see a master index. Special thanks to all our reviewers during March -- 78 in all -- who took the time to help out. _ We hope the webmasters of these websites really appreciate the time taken by these generous folks. |
Barber Brothers Dealerships
http://www.barberbros.com A Big Thumb's Up on this one! I REALLY like this site. Their organization is clear, the graphics are great and load quickly, the information they offer is complete, and they look like they've really put some time and effort into creating it. The navigation is easy, too. Barbara Tipton The site also worked for Tim, with observations... I like this site, but what ever is on the left hand side (applet button) was not working. I just got a gray box using Win 95 w/ Netscape 4.0. Tim also observed problems with the colors and background texture, agreeing with WE&R and Mary (ihla). Thanks Tim - http:www/rust.net/~timb Pat Dorman took it one step further... 1. Place vertical menu bar on far right side of site. 2. Place the red header above the paragraph that says: "With 4 dealerships..." 3. Move the names, addresses, etc. of the 4 dealerships underneath the paragraph referred to in point #2. Increase the type size of these addresses to about 9 or 10 pt. Hard to read. 4.Place the search bar underneath the car graphic where the menu bars were. Perhaps increase the changing car graphic to better match the length of the search bar. 5. Remove the car vignette all together and place the introductory paragraph in its place. Change the width of this paragraph to fit between the search bar on the left of the site and the vertical menu bars on the right with about 6 pica of white space on each side. Good Luck! Mary Mary offered a rather detailed review of this site, agreeing with a number of our observations. We link her review and comments to her own page, yet include here: Splash page did not have time to load before refresh. Hated the khaki background color that loaded before the background texture. Does not relate at all well to the crisp red/white/blue scheme of the site itself. Neither does the choice of text colors. Would look much better in shades of blue and red: Text - #000066, Links - #CC0000, Active Links - #FF0000, Visited Links - #000099. The teal, green, and magenta just don't work! Mary continues... Pages are too wide for 640x480 resolution (still the norm). Pages loaded very fast. Love the animated cars in the top left, but the animation is too fast. Would be more effective if it switch every 5 seconds so it doesn't look like a "morphing" car. __ You also might consider making it a link to the home page. __ Type on the navigation buttons is impossible to read at 1024x768 resolution, and the mouseovers are even worse with the white aliasing around the red letters. __ Very nice use of a light image as a background for the car brand navigation. The "Visit the Barber Brothers Dealerships" lines and the rest of the page bottoms look weird because the "Visit..." line is center with the table cell while the rest is centered on the table row. Nice use of maps to show directions to locations. The cartoon car on the Kelly Blue Book page doesn't not fit with the look of the rest of the site, nor does the graphic on the calculator page. The use of a photo would be much better - perhaps one of someone looking over a car for the KBB page, and a photo of a calculator or a person writing something on paper. I have seen several stock photos that would fit well. The photo could be very small, maybe even screened back for effect with feathered or diffused edges. __ On the manufacturers page, the Coachmen logo is too prominent and rough looking. Reducing it in half will both smooth it and make it less noticeable. Don't like the wide table border around the logos. Looks contrived. ** Alt tags could be better used for those who surf with graphics turned off. Some of the links didn't work. All in all this site just misses being great. There's lots of really good resources that might make me consider buying a car from Barber Brothers if I lived in the area, but with just a few adjustments, it could be improved greatly. |
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"Does not provide enough time for the intro page to visually establish" . |
Other comments from other reviewers... Excellent site, love it. Uniformity between pages very professional. Fast loading, very easy to read , excellent use of "Font Face". I'd like to congratulate the Author, but I cant find his email address in the code.... Introductory page default/index.html comes up and refreshes to main.html within 3 seconds, Does not provide enough time on the intro page to really have it serve a purpose. Also in my personal opinion, why waste 43k (intro.gif) on an intro page that does less for you than introductory text can do? Full Screen on my 15" monitor, the site still had to be scrolled to the right to be able to read the site text. The go bar provides a convenient means of navigation to the different manufactures the dealer carries, however because it's a Java applet it puts limits on the site to those using 32bit processors which eliminates a large portion of the visitors using older machines and operating systems. Since there are only 13 links on the go bar, it might be wise to put them in something more universal such as JavaScript or put them as text links. ** Another direction? Take the intro.gif from the introduction page and make it an image map to the manufacturers pages in the site. All is not bad with this site, the graphics seem to be well done and load rather quickly. The designer seems to have had convenience in mind when designing the navigation, and with a little tweaking this site could better serve its purpose. |
Design & Publishing . / . WEB . / . Critique . / . 9803 Reviews Index
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