www.dappercycles.co.uk Classic vintage/dutch inspired bikes

http://www.dappercycles.co.uk Online shop for classic vintage, traditional & dutch inspired bicycles is almost ready to go live! Just waiting for the last stages of the payment processing to be set up.

Many thanks to the Opencart community for your help - couldn't have done it without you!

I know what's good about my site but what I *really* want to know is what's not so good! Feel free to be blunt, your feedback would be really appreciated!

Would you trust this site enough to spend say £300 with us? If not, why not?
What could I do to improve usability and user experience?
Did anything irritate or confuse when navigating the site?
Aside from the product images does the site feel masculine, feminine or unisex?
Anything else?

Thanks in advance!

Ok, there are a lot of things I like about your site but, per your request, I'm skipping over all that. Here are some things I would change if it were my site:

-home button in the main nav bar. I don't find using just the logo to be very intuitive.
-image quality on home page banners - looks like these were stretched trying to make them large enough to fill the space. They are pretty pixelated. I get the "vintage" look, but I think you could pull that off in a SUPER professional way while still having crisp looking photos and it would add a lot of user confidence.
-all the points on your homepage are great for your brand... but what if I google "bronx bicycle" and land on this page: http://www.dappercycles.co.uk/vintage-b ... x-savannah? How do I know that you have free delivery, lifetime warranty, price match, etc? These are all really important things when trying to convert a potential customer, and there is no way they'll know unless they navigate to the home page.
-FAQ page: these links should be clickable. Even using a simple link so the page scrolls to the answer would be beneficial here.
-Information pages: why are they at the bottom? I would add a drop down on the main nav to make these pages more accessible.
-featured and footer design: these are obviously the default styles from the default theme. They just don't fit. I would come up with something that looks vintage and totally cool.

I agree with almost everything forsakeofreason has posted.

home button: I'm okay with the logo being the home button, but that's because I see it more and more. Not everyone else is used to that, so you may want to consider adding a home button.

Image quality: The image quality on the home page banners look horrible. As a customer, if I have not seen the product in person to know it was made well, I would take my search elsewhere. With today's technology, there is no excuse for poor photos on a new web site.

FAQ page: Products, Payments and Other should be clickable links to scroll you down to those sections. People have a tendency to expect that now.

Information pages: I would move them to a menu link at the top. There is plenty of room and why make people hunt for that info.

featured: you might want to consider modifying it to match your colors in your menu. The stock colors do not catch my attention with all the white in your background.

footer: Once you move the Information data up to the menu, the footer may not look so bad, but the further you scroll down the home page, the less "vintage" it appears and the more "bland" it becomes.

Site map: Code it or remove it.

contact page: check your code. You have font styles changing in the text. You have a home link on that page as well as a contact us link which is not needed. this page does not quite match the rest of your pages.

Hi guys and thank you so much for replying with your very useful and considered comments. Sorry for the late response by the way, I thought notifications were automatic - only just spotted the "notify me when a reply is posted" checkbox! :-S

Home page button - I'm undecided on this one really but I can appreciate the arguments for and against. Perhaps I'll come up with a compromise.
Banner image quality - I'll get these sorted asap!! Getting a little too obsessed with page load times there I think.
FAQ page - yep clickable links are on the to-do list!
Information pages - good idea! I'll implement your suggestions.
Product pages - can't believe I didn't think of that! Vitally important, will get that sorted!

@forthesakeofreason
- Yes the featured and footer design are the default designs and you're absolutely right, they're bland! You've sparked off a few thoughts about what I could do here but any particular ideas that sprang to mind for you?

@upacreek
- Featured and footer - I absolutely agree. Any thoughts on what I could do here styling wise?
- Site map - what do you mean "code it or remove it?" So I should abandon the Opencart version (which seems to be dynamic) and write a static one as a separate html page, linked from the site?
- Contact page - yep the hyperlink formatting is off on this and a few other pages. It's on the to-do list!

Thanks very much again guys, this is the sort of no nonsense feedback I was looking for. It's invaluable and I really appreciate you both taking the time to post replies.

Thanks again!
Paul

Hi there,

I think that everyone has covered everything. But I wanted to know how did you customise your contact form?

Was it a mod or did you code it yourself. I think its great and would love to do something like that for mysite.

fullcolourstore wrote:Hi there,

I think that everyone has covered everything. But I wanted to know how did you customise your contact form?

Was it a mod or did you code it yourself. I think its great and would love to do something like that for mysite.

Hi. I'm glad you liked the contact form! Yes I coded it myself, although it's not extensive. Not sure what modifications you want to make but here is an outline of what I did...
Text is just a welcome module positioned content right with a few hyperlinks in it.
Button - created a new button style (need to mod several files for this) and photoshopped for colour change.
Text in form - again made changes to the code to insert text.
Commented out the lines of code to get rid of the captcha.

That's it really! ...but you do need a basic understanding of the code that makes up Opencart. Hope that helps!

I would do something full screen for the footer like attached. If I had more time, I'd have ideas for the featured, but I'm sure you can come up with something.

Sorry. Not much time to write.

Sitemap:
I was not clear on that and didn't finish my thoughts. Viewing with Firefox on XP, it's chock full of errors. "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."

@forthesakeofreason and @upacreek

Thanks again guys. Really appreciate your time!
Will repost when mods are done.

Cheers,

Paul