I’ve been working with Magento since its first beta. Been enjoying it ever since. This was my first time making an e-commerce site and for a client at that. Just launched the site roughly 24 hours ago and the clients are very pleased with it. The site is somewhat different than your traditional store in that to browse the store all the items are shown on one page.
Maybe the “traditional” stores have it right after all? I can’t picture anyone sticking around for that. Even after it’s loaded most are going to say “Now what the $#^$%^# do I do?”
Poor, poor design from a functionality standpoint IMHO.
Well it looks nice, but the navigation and to find anything takes a bit. I couldn’t find a search feature either. Another positive though is that if the customer isn’t a savvy shopper the nav will work for them, because they can just look for their items. Which is a interesting approach.
Hello, you have done a lot of work and design changes compared to the usual layout. You have come up with a original site that has a nice rural atmosphere about it.
However, you should look for a better web host (faster) for Magento? Right now the site is too slow.
Also, as a customer I would like to see more and bigger pictures of each product.
Agree with other about the speed, also, I think you may like to rework your ‘king and queen font’ - perhaps increasing the letter space, it’s too hard for my eyes (and I am not old but stare too long hours on my screen), the word as a whole, the readability is very poor.
Some typefaces are simply not suitable for the web.
Thanks for comments and feedback. I appreciate them
Sadly, I do have to agree with the speed of the site. It isn’t what I was hoping for obviously but I suppose that’s what you get when hosting on a shared server. The “Peek” page is mainly the only very slow page but the client can live with that (until they decide to get a dedicated server).
The “king and queen” font used in many of the buttons are actually hand drawn so I couldn’t easily make changes to them. The clients use this text all over the place on other things so there’s no way to get them to change it. I appreciate your concern though
The use of only one image (and a small one at that) was, again, a request by the client. Deleted the favicon while I was at it…
And thanks for the “un-Magento"-ness comments. I enjoyed tearing apart the templates making it. Getting away from the default template was nice.
The site has been bringing in significant sales and the clients couldn’t be more pleased with it so far. Go go Magento!
Site loads great for me. It’s the middle of the day so I think it’s ok. Peek was a little slow (3-4 seconds). Design is very different. It has a home feel to it. Here’s a question… How long did it take you to create the new theme/template? I’ve been wondering that myself as I prepare for a redesign that I want to do in Magento.
Great job doing something a little different and out of the box. I would agree with others that from a web design and usability perspective it isn’t the best. However, I can understand requirements from a client that force specific things.
As of today the site is loading just fine on my computer and I find the design to be quite unique (although I would say to throw in more colors.
Seigel, you should check your own work before knocking others. This person clearly spent a lot of time on this site whereas yours looks like your basic osCommerce installation.
This should not be a place to act rudely. If you have nothing good to say then don’t say it.
Altough I must admit this design does not fit entirely my tastes when it comes to colors and layout, I do really appreciate its originality and high-level of costumization.
The slow page load times are most definitely because of the server. It’s on a $10/month 1and1 shared server so I would advise that anyone launching a Magento store to not use shared hosting if you are expecting much traffic. I have the site running locally on my computer but it speeds along happily unlike the live version. I have been looking into virtual private servers a bit and I’m eying http://www.slicehost.com. I think moving the site onto a 256slice would be a huge improvement (plus I could use caching, ect.)
@ DDMAN
I would say roughly 20 hours or so. However, this was my first time and I’d expect I could do it again in half the time easily because of the learning curve of the template system. Mock-ups of each page were made by the client so all I had to do is slice it apart in PS.
@ Ron Seigel
I do not think the design is poor from a functionality standpoint. The root cause is the server (which I realize now isn’t very good to run Magento on). Caching on the “Peek” page would solve the issue (which unfortunately I do not think is possible on my host).
@ others
Thanks for complements on the site—very appreciated
