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PiKe

PiKe

PiKe

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
25,287
Location
Lake District
I need the honest opinion of many people here on two versions of the company website.

I have done all the work on this site and I have realised it's a bit rough and dated so I decided to redesign it and make it look more modern and clean.

Problem is my creative juices are being stifled because I'm being requested to implement things from the old pages.

For example the menu bar on the new design, imo, is 100x better, but the old one is preferred. Secondly it is thought that some pages from the old site (no colour changes or anything) could simply be used.

I'm gob smacked and feel very strongly about this, I'm not designing a site and dropping old pages in, it will look monumentally awful, amateurish and unprofessional. I would refuse to do this because even though I'm uncredited I would feel ashamed of it.

Here are the pages in question, let me know any criticisms you might have, the 'new' page is sparse on content but the main stuff is there.

http://www.vkguy.co.uk/index.php
http://www.vkguy.co.uk/carl/index.php
 
Well, the old one's header is good because it's very thin. A fixed header can't afford to waste any space, and your new one does... The search is on the wrong side for one and the numbers could go on the same line so that the max header height is basically just the logo's.

There's not much else to go on. The new one is a plain black background with a blue nav bar. What have you used as inspiration? I definitely think it's worth a re-design.. but I would take a look at some of the modern design examples.
 
gord said:
Well, the old one's header is good because it's very thin. A fixed header can't afford to waste any space, and your new one does... The search is on the wrong side for one and the numbers could go on the same line so that the max header height is basically just the logo's.

There's not much else to go on. The new one is a plain black background with a blue nav bar. What have you used as inspiration? I definitely think it's worth a re-design.. but I would take a look at some of the modern design examples.
Click to expand...

Well my boss had a meeting with a consultancy company to improve our business, one of their things was to make the site more visually appealing, all I have really done is translate their design into what will be our dynamic pages.

I realise there is some wasted screen estate but I do prefer that over just having the Nav hanging there as it gets a bit confused with the pictures on the old site once you start scrolling down, and I do wonder how many people even notice it's there. One of my arguments was it wasn't really required as people instinctively scroll up to the top of pages, but that was ignored.

You say the search is on the wrong side? Do you just feel it would balance better on the right or is there some other reason?
 
PiKe said:
I realise there is some wasted screen estate but I do prefer that over just having the Nav hanging there as it gets a bit confused with the pictures on the old site once you start scrolling down, and I do wonder how many people even notice it's there. One of my arguments was it wasn't really required as people instinctively scroll up to the top of pages, but that was ignored.

You say the search is on the wrong side? Do you just feel it would balance better on the right or is there some other reason?
Click to expand...

Yes, I wasn't saying remove the header or the logo. Fixed headers can be done well, but you need to think hard about the design. You can easily streamline your navigation/logo/search and make it a useful header.

As for the search being on the wrong side, look at the top right of your browser, open an explorer window, boot up your mac and where is the main find function? If you are going to put a search feature anywhere else on a page other than the top right, you need to have a damn good reason.
 
In my line of work I'm more concerned with usability than design, and I have to say your new header is much better in some areas in this regard.

People don't expect to see the main nav at the very top of a page as with the old site. It's not consistent with most sites out there that use horizontal navigation. Look at all the big sites out there - Overclockers, Play, John Lewis etc. etc. etc. Nav always comes under the main logo with any login/account links at the top right, though you do the latter wrong. The order of your nav items is confused. Login, My Profile and Register should be in the top right of the header (again look at Overclockers, JL and Play). Don't be fussed about centring or "filling" your nav bar so it uses 100% of the width.

Agree with gord on the search box, it should be on the right to be consistent with most other websites (and as such where the user will invariably expect to find it).

The biggest usability issue though - what the hell is the site for? I assume you want to sell these images but there's no clue to this when you first enter the site. Some people will be saying "What is an image library?". Are these for web use? Do you do prints? At least the old site has the line "For purchasing and pricing information please contact us." which hints at this, yours doesn't hint that anything can be bought here.

How about some categories? Split the images into themes and at the very, very least split by country.

JavaScript popup is annoying. istockphoto.com have a much better solution - actually take them to an actionable page.

Design itself is mostly personal opinion... but I will say your new logo looks quite jaggy and a bit unprofessional because of this. Your mock design much more modern in comparison though, but that wouldn't be too hard...

I realise it may just be a mock at this stage but you're trying to impress so go the extra mile. Make all your links point to "#" and get the rollover effect working on the nav at least. Also noticed it's broken in Chrome but that doesn't matter at this stage.
 
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@PoisonJam thanks for your reply.

I will take on board about the nav order and other points you have mentioned. Consistancy is indeed the key.

Yes the website doesn't really explain what it's about and that is one of our main problems, it's really only ever used by existing clients and the website never seems to generate new business. This is why the colsultancy people were hired. The idea is to have a welcome page of sorts to tell people who we are and what we do.

I could go the extra mile and make it fully functioning on the new design with all pages but I don't want to go to all that effort to be told to just put it back to how it was, and I'm deffinately not spending my own personal time on it.
 
PiKe said:
the website never seems to generate new business.
Click to expand...

SEO, PPC, social media and other online marketing :)

It's also not very user or conversion friendly, as we've established. It looks like you have a Google Analytics snippet in there so you should be able to go into Analytics and see where traffic's coming from and where people fall off the site, though I expect most will be bounces from the home page.
 
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you could easily reduce the size of the header by 30% just by moving the search box up to the side of the logo or completely off the page as from what i can tell all image names are numbers so not like someone will type in lighthouse and find 026351-03.
 
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