Lucy,

First off I'm very impressed with the quality of the art images you've produced - all too often when things are scanned and resized for use on the web, all the quality is leeched out of the original...but you've kept them looking really good.

My first comment about your ite is that I think you should use the first page for something other than a confirmation that the visitor has arrived. Web visitors make up their mind to stay and browse or to click away in just a few seconds, so if you use those few seconds up on displaying your logo, you're reducing your chances of success. You'd probably find it illuminating to look in your server log files to see how long (in seconds) the average visitor stays. It's frightening - even the major internet players have to fight for every second. If you don't believe me - next time you browse the internet yourself...just think how long you give a site yourself before you have decided whether it's good or bad. If I were you, I'd have featured artwork up on the front page, as well as a really concise summary of what the purpose of the site is. With invitations to get straight down to business and start viewing artwork.


I did a quick search on Google for 'buy UK art online' and I took a quick look at www.minigallery.co.uk - one thing I liked there was that they had a facility to browse art by price/size/media/format/artist etc. Compare this with the way your art is laid out where I have to like the look of the first thumbnail for a specific artist and then drill down to see their work to see if it really is what I'm in the market to buy.

If this Brickies feedback prompts you to make any changes to your site - I'd advise doing more Google searches for your competition before you start the changes. Be all over their sites like a rash, noting down everything that works well and what doesn't actually add any value. That should give you a good idea of what to change or add on your own site. I don't want to sound like I'm saying that sites have to be idenitkit versions of one another, but basically taking a cold hard look at what works for the best sites you know, will enable you to cut to the chase with your own site.

Finally, one other thing I'd change is the dot background which sits under the text and stays still when the page is scrolled up...I'd remove that background image totally, as it's a little distracting - expecially on the 'view art' page where you introduce your artists.

Hope that's useful feedback - and all good luck with the venture.

Regards,


Annette
http://www.gardenopoly.co.uk
http://www.picnicworld.co.uk
http://www.papernation.co.uk

to many dots on opening page made my sight go strange!

Excellent art but this is not a "selling" site. Suggestions are:
1. Drop the opening welcome screen.
2. Put art on the opening page e.g. "This weeks/months star selection/bargains"
3. Sell off the page - Paypal is very easy to set up - see www.allwebcodesign.com for specimen templates.
4. Show photos of artists in their own settings - this is art made by humans.
5. Included a contact telephone number.
6. Ask for email addresses for a newsletter.
7. Consider selling good quality photos of the art. At the moment people can download the pics for nothing as you have no effective anti-copying precautions. Put a copyright notice on the foot of every page.
8. Ditch the ugly menu frame on the left and use the first column of a table including a neat javascript menu. (see allwebcodesign again). This will also make the site easier to manage as it expands.

Very best wishes.

Warren
wward@innatehealth.com

Hi,

Great name and some lovely artwork for sale. I did not see the need for the first page.

I have also not had many direct sales through my sight and I think our problem could be the same in only accepting Cheques. If you can use a card you have more security as a customer and could lead to better impulse purchases. I also thought the dots in the background is a good idea and gives a great effect when you scan down the page, but are too strong, they should fade into the background.

I like the concept of the site that any artist can add their art and that you can arrange exhibitions for them.

I didn't find it easy to find out how to buy. Have you thought about a adding a cart - a simple free cart to use would be www.mals-e.com.

From the artists point of view and to add an additional income stream to your site you could add suppliers of art materials by using affiliate links.

For anyone who is looking to sell their art on the internet it would be good if you were to offer a printing and framing service, I am sure this would encourage budding artists to take the plunge without all the hassle.

As a business promoting visual images I found your "main" page had too much text. You should include some images to link to viewing and buying the art and even a featured artist.

Good luck with your site.

Pete
www.butonz.com

hi everyone,

thanks very much for all the feedback so far, good and bad. while a few things people have said are in the pipeline already (eg. the infamous frames(!), register page and buy link) it is great to get fresh opinions. now so many of you have mentioned the dots being too predominant i can see exactly what you mean, and the same goes for having the background on the view art page. there also seems to be a consensus that the logo intro page should go. i really appreciate all your help so keep posting!

thanks again,

lucy.

Great name!
I think this site isn't too far away from being good in my opinion (I'm no expert). It's clear and very simple to navigate. It's also clear what they're selling!
I quite like the intro-page it's very simple and doesn't take an age to load. To me it's like being outside the front door of a shop and it really makes it very obvious what the site is there for.
I think the site has to be focused more to selling the art. I would make the Customer's home page the site's home page. Trust me a budding artists will find the relavant pages - they've got more to gain!
The blue dot background has GOT to go on the view image pages! In my view it's got to be white - just like in a gallery.
I also think you need to consider a simple search routine. Different ways of looking at the pictures.
Each piece of art could be categorised. For example,
By type (oil, photograph e.t.c.)
By price
By Artist (got this one!)
Key word (pictures based around water, abstract, landscape e.t.c)
You want people to encourage people to browse - to get them to look at all possible art they could be interested in.

I think you need to think of ways of finding out the people who browse your site would consider buying from it or if indeed there are specific pieces of art that interest them. Why don't you design your site to capture this information? That way you're building up a potential customer base which will be very valuable to you...
Maybe subscribe to a newsletter? To encourage people to be kept informed of new art that has just come in.
Maybe allow people to express an interest in a picture -
You could email them a bit more information, but most importantly you know who they are?
May be ability to create a favourites list? Getting them to spend more time browsing - but more importantly starting on that decision making, which ones do I choose to buy from...

good luck!

Robin@win-it.com

Generally I thought it was a good uncluttered website.

Couple of comments though.

fade the dots, they do detract.

Bin the'welcome' page. i'm not interested.

If you're primarily trying to sell pictures then use them. at present you encourage people to go through various pages before they actually get to see any pictures. You want them to see the pictures quickly or they get bored.

on the 'artist selction' page, i would make each artists picture bigger. I've got a reasonable size screen and some of the thumbnails weren't good enough.

Genearlly I would make the pictures on the artist website bigger too, or possibly have a single large image which scrolls through the pictures - perhaps with small thumbnals underneath so that I could select a particular image - which would then come up on the central LARGE frame.

As someone else said below. it is all about the pictures.

Hi.
The splash page, although has the logo as a link - it doesn't look like a link. For some it may just look like a holding page. Grab some trial software for log file analysis - and see how many Homepage losses you get - ie how many people get to your homepage and then instantly going to another site.

Once you get into the site itself, I would bin the frames. This isn't going to help with your SEO.

Your page Titles need to be keyword rich and descriptive. They currently appear to be the same for all pages.

On pages where you are showing actual pictures of art, I would bin the dotty background - as this can actually detract from the pictures themselves. White background, or at least plain backgrounds, are the way forward.

Create a sitemap page that can be easily found and spidered by the search engines. These should have the main links to the key categories of your website.

I wuold recommend more uniformity in the navigation sidebar. Some links are bold and underlined others are just lower case and not bold. Perhaps break these down into more structured mini menus? I would actually move some of these links into a footer which would be relevant for every page that a customer is on - FAQ, Contact Us etc etc

To improve conversion of lookers-to-bookers, the call-to-action needs to be more prominent on the pages where you are showing the images of the artwork. ie where I see a picture and a price, I want to click on a "Buy", or "Add to Basket" type of button and enter some details to pay.

Finally, on your View Art page, you have listed about 20-odd artists. If each of these artists have their own website as well, you need to ensure that they link to your site with keyword rich anchor text. Link building is a key element to visibility on the web.

Hope this helps.

Barry Smith
SkyScanner.net
Cheap Flights

Edited by author 21-04-2005 01:08 PM
As a follow-up to my previous post I just checked one page at random (the news page) and unfortunately it failed the XHTML validator.

See the result here : Validator results

I would take out the Valid XHTML Logo if it was my site.

I'm afraid I have big problems with this site but you can ignore my criticisms if you wish.

1. You have an intro page. Nobody wants a welcome, they want information. Dump it.

2. You use frames. While perfectly valid in itself it uglifies your site on my browser and is totally unnecessary. You should condense the links or use drop-downs because I can't see them all without scrolling.

3. The site is predominently blue (which is fine a s background) but without images to brighten it up it looks rather cold.

4. You are selling to people who live and breathe images and get turned on visually so you are setting very high standards for yourself so OK (which is where I'd say the website's at) is not good enough.

I hope this helps.

Chris Price, Choctaw

Good stuff:
The site looks like it is coded to standards (XHTML/CSS) and the homepage displays the relevant W3C Logo's.

The Navigation is simple and clear.

Page layouts are semantically corrent using proper headings that help the skim-reading visitor look around the page quickly - for the home page at least.

As the layout is simple and clean the page load time is good.

News and updates are displayed - keeping the visitor informed of changes and letting visitors know there is new content.

Not so good stuff:
Standards
The site displays the W3C standards logo's but doesn't link back to the validator to prove those standards are upheld. For example like this (from our homepage) Valid XHTML

Framesets - Navigation
The Navigation is based around a frameset which causes problems with a lot of search engines - they have real problems getting to your content. For example if someone searches for content and finds your site (follow this next link for a Google search) Dot Art Google search then they actually see the content page. The problem (as you can see) is that they don't see the navigation system - they can't get off of the page! So some visitors may get 'stuck' and only visit one page, or leave the site frustrated. Follow the search results in google and you should see exactly what I mean.

Graphic design
The graphic design does have some issues for me but the following is simply my own opinion. There is a background image sitting behind the content of each and every page. The image is fairly large (670 x 666 pixels) and tends to dominate the screen area. Looking at the image in grayscale it becomes easier to see the issue with contrast. I created a greyscale version here which should help to emphasize the issue. The text does not contrast so well against the circles in the background making it more diffcult to read. I know the image is part of the branding for the site but it gets in the way of the content. As the image is "fixed" and does not move when the user scrolls down this adds to the problem as the text floats over the top. The body text is also a fairly light blue which doesn't help it contrast so well as most of the circles are blue/blue-green too.

Contact Information
You have an e-mail address displayed which is great but I bet it attracts tons of junk mail right? Well you can tackle this by encrypting your email address so that the spammers can't harvest or 'scrape' your address from a page.
A better option (I would do both) would be to give your visitors a contact form to fill in. The contact form will help to prompt and guide your visitors into contacting you. Having an e-mail address displayed means the visitor has to click the link and then write an e-mail - that's assuming they have an e-mail application like outlook! What if they are in a Cyber Cafe or Public library with no access to email software? A form would allow them to send a message without the need for any special software. A form would also hide your email address from view and you would still recieve the email from them (or deposit the data in a database - or Both!) and they have less work to do with a lower likelihood of something going wrong.

Well that turned into an essay before I knew it!

Jez Swinscoe
Design Consultant
Make Hay Ethical E-Media
http://www.makehay.co.uk

Also I'd lose the splash page as this hampers your search engine visibility and delays getting to the action - users are highly impatient and aren't really looking for an experience on the web (well kids are perhaps) - they want information, quickly and with a conversational tone that encourages them to read on and trust the 'voice' behind the company.

But the again what I know about art you could write on the back of a menu button.

I could not get on the site from the link in the brick email - "Server Not Found"

Uses frames (hence the scrollbar on the menu) which is pretty much a no-no.

The no-capitalisation is possibly "art-cool" but looks unprofessional and doesn't inspire trust.

Inconsistent use of "us" and "me" blurs identity of organisation - is it a one-woman band or a serious business? (Yes I know it's art etc that cannot be constrained by such ugly concepts as traditional business models but the problem was not closing sales)

Dots background too much - fade it back or darken text

"click here" should be avoided - make the relevant word the link

bottom line is that i'm not sure if the site would ever convince me to drop £600 on a painting - surely you don't make those sort of decisions based on a jpeg? i would focus the goal of the site more towards initiating contact with art-buyers, giving them clear incentives to attend shows etc

HTH
Kevin Browning
www.kmdwebdesign.com

Lovely site and very interesting content. My only comment would be that some of the writing blends into the back ground 'spot' - perhaps a darker colour for the text - the same colour as the titles?