New website - any constructive thoughts??

Hi,

One of my pals (whom a few people have met when we did the newbies trackday at Snetterton a while back) is trying to start up a new business. It’s for retro-style custom bikes (bobbers), made to order. He asked me what I thought of his website and whether I could see what others thought too.

Could you please spare a minute (it won’t take longer than that, as it’s quite sparce at the moment) to have a look and then let me know what you think of the site, the concept and if there is market for this sort of thing in the UK (not really my cup of tea, but each to their own!)?

www.rudedude.co.uk

Thanks peeps :slight_smile:

Slight mistake with the mailto tag on the contact page making second email address no clickable

Current:
a href="mailto:[email protected]">@hotmail.co.uk
@hotmail.co.uk

Should be:
a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]
[email protected]

It doesn’t actually say what the service offered is on the Home page. Needs to say something like- Bespoke Hand-built Motorcycles…etc. Could also do with some punchy text about the guys experience and ability- maybe a quote from a satisfied customer.:slight_smile:

Nice looking site, but I found the dark grey text over the lighter grey background made it a little difficult to read.
Where are they based?
Might want to use a better email host than hotmail, maybe.

If he’s got any samples he’d like test riding for a while, for the price of a positive quote or two, tell him to get in touch!!:wink:

I had a look before reading others comments and agree with all those made above, especially the text colour.

Not my thing…but looks like a good idea…:smiley:

Hi Mad Scientist,

I thought the grey on grey was quiet easy on the eye and sylish. I didn’t have too much trouble reading it. Black backgrounds look too dark and moody and a white background may look too clean and clinical for this market.

I clicked the hotmail email link, to see if it worked, and had all sorts of windows appear, which were a real pain in the ar$e to exit from.

Slightly pedantic, I know, but I would expect a professional website to contain no spelling or grammer errors. So: “well the bikes speak for thereselves”. Should this read “themselves” or “theirselves”? My money’s on “themselves”.

Good luck with it.

Thanks for the comments, I’ll feed them all back. :slight_smile:

the pictures on the products page are stretched, making the whole thing look very unprofessional.

Long time :slight_smile:

I think the landing page (home page) needs a bit more, not sure what the brown box is the upper left is supposed to be? Also don’t have a counter as the first thing people see, should be at the bottom if anywhere at all.

There is some very small text that comes up both in the banner and the upper right of the page, it look sgood, but might confuse people if they cannot read it?

Agreed on the photos, need to set them to the same resolution as the image placeholder.

In the contact us the Ben and Wayne should be aligned together.

The spacing underneath the products page is too much, pushes the bottom banner down.

On the bottom banner the circles next to the ‘Home’, ‘About’, ‘Products’ etc should be clickable as well.

Not sure if the white small text titles on each page are needed, the text of the larger titles is better (and it means that some titles are repeated)

Just chucking the ideas down, sorry if it seems abrupt :slight_smile:

Wow…where do i start…the colours are a bit dull…sorry. :slight_smile:

The spelling…wow…Its easy…just copy paste it into a word doc and you will see all the spelling errors and fragmented text…lol…

I know it sounds slightly anal…but it means the difference between a professionally presented company image and a Mickey Mouse one. Sorry but that’s the impression you send if you don’t fix that.

Why is the counter the first thing you see on the homepage? Its the most eye catching thing on the page but not really relevant to a customer…lol

There is also no header stating what you do…the long explaination is nice…but you need a heading/slogan saying what you guys do so it is apparent from the word go. Your homepage needs some serious PUNCH!

The buttons on the banner beneath dont seem to work…?

Did anyone else find the pic of the staff slightly disconcerting…loopy?..no offense guys…:smiley: Not sure if I want a mad scientist building my bike for me…I am sure you would be a blast to hang out with…:w00t:

Good luck with everything!

They’ve updated the site since I looked at it - HOW DARE THEY STEAL MY NAME??? :crazy: This mad scientist does not build bikes (well unless you call putting my bike back together…) or build websites for that matter.

E - yeah definitely too long, there must be an xmas party or bowling trip coming up soon :stuck_out_tongue:

Boris and E - the gallery pics look ok on my pc - could it be a browser issue (I completely defer to your techie knowledge).

I completely agree about the proof reading, filling out the content, making sure links work correctly (and taking out parts that should be links-if that’s what they intended), moving the counter and getting rid of the freaky picture of Ben and Wayne in their work gear for their day jobs!

Thanks for the comments - keep them coming, they’ve been far more constructive than I initially hoped for :smiley:

if it helps:

english/grammar is poor. comma usage isn’t appropriate and sentences are too long in places

there are navigation links on both the top and the bottom of the pages which is unnecessary

on individual pages the title is repeated in two different coloured fonts?

thumbnails (non gallery pages) are landscape crop forced into a square

left side box serves no purpose other than on the ‘about’ page where it hosts two further links. either it needs to be used on every page, or removed.

counter should be at the bottom of the main page (if shown at all, you can get info from google stats that would be more useful)

the site is about bikes but you only see them in relatively small image size after going through all the tabs. I’m not sure people would get that far given the issues above. issue may be that the originals are not high enough resolution to use on a larger scale. if so they need to be reshot, or recently completed bikes shot on a camera with sufficiently high resolution to use as lead shots on the site IMHO

i guess the other thing at this stage is that if there isn’t attention to detail on the website, i’m not sure that speaks volumes over the workmanship of the bikes (even if that isn’t the case)