Ancient Warrior

Hi all

Paid a few hundred pounds for this website to be 'designed'. After seeing a few on here I'm beginning to think its not the best of jobs for the price, could be wrong.

A few pointers on how to make it look more professional would be great please!

http://www.ancientwarrior.co.uk/store

Tj

There's a few things I'd work on here.

First of all get a favicon, secondly the top banner doesn't blend in nicely, so I'd work on that too if I was you.

The big gap where you should have a scrolling slider or something needs some images or content too.

Look at a colour scheme, because to me it looks like it doesn't have one, just black + grey, kinda plain

I hope this helps

Andy

I would suggest to work on the contents first. Make sure you have good quality images and text for your products. Design wise keeping it simple most of the time works, so if you want a black and white colour scheme, I don't see why would not work. Just make sure they layed out properly, spaced out nicely, and maybe mobile friendly.

On the category view I would put 3 or maybe just 2 products in a row, and make the images bigger, not having a lot of text for your products I would take the single products pages out, and keep everything on the category page, as I did in most of my shops.

As the previous comment says do something with the header image, it looks very outdated, making a proper logo might help. Have you got a shop in Scarborough? You have no address set up, this might turn some customers down.

Thanks very much for your pointers.

The reason the banner is there is because that is what is above our shop front i:e how we are recognised. would you recommend getting another logo? or i could use the yellow circular 'ancient warrior' as we have the rights for that logo.

what is the benefit of having a favicon?

also, what do you mean about the category view?
once again, thanks

Would agree with all the previous comments you designer did nothing more than adapt the default OpenCart template and didn't do that very well either.
Your enlarged images for the product need to served from an image bigger than the default size. Let the php, javascript and ajax take care of reduction for smaller images, that's what it good at.
I would suggest have main image size starting at 550px x 550px leaves a little spare I know but fills the zoom window a lot better.
Remember to use a lossless compression on them though or you'll slow the page down a lot more than it is right now.

As for the benefits of a favicon look at the top of your browser window? Are there a few tabs open? which ones stand out?
bet it's not the one or two with the default web document icon? Also helps your site site out from a list in the favourites folder. Adds a little finishing touch, says look I went to the bother of styling this little 16 x16 icon to make it look all groovy for ya!

No offence intended, hope there's none taken.