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Peer Review of Ruthie's Music
By Matt Doyle
Contributing Writer
Article Date: 11.21.02
RuthiesMusic.com
RuthiesMusic.com is an online music equipment retailer. The site has a
clean, businesslike design with hundreds of products available for sale.
The site fits nicely width-wise on an 800x600 display, and the page
layout is easy to read and follow. The main menu on the left is
organized by product type, and the site features the all-important
Customer Service and FAQ text links at the bottom of every page. A link
to the shopping cart is available at the top of the page, showing the
number of items that have been added to the cart.
Overall, the site is clean-looking, relatively uncluttered, and easy to
use. So what could be improved?
The blue color scheme, while laid-back and unobtrusive, lacks an accent
color to balance the blues. This results in a rather cold, sterile feel
to the site. A splash of orange, brown or beige would help to lift the
mood of the design and introduce an element of warmth.
The menu options to the left of the page allow access to the wide range
of products on sale. Each menu option opens up when clicked on to
reveal a list of sub-categories. As there are so many types of musical
instrument, the list of menu options is very long, even requiring the
user to scroll the page to view them all. The list is quite bewildering
to a new visitor!
One possible solution would be to further group the instrument types by
category. For example, the top-level menu could show just String
Instruments, Wind Instruments, Brass, etc. This would greatly reduce
the number of menu options that the visitor initially sees, resulting in
a less cluttered appearance and a better experience for the user.
Another great way to improve the menu's usability and appearance would
be to use a different color or arrow shape for the "non-product"
options, such as Home and Search, to distinguish these options from the
product list.
A small but effective improvement would be to double the horizontal
white space between the left hand blue menu column and the body text in
the main column. At the moment the gap is only a few pixels wide,
resulting in a slightly cluttered look and making the body text hard to
read. As in a book, it's important to have wide margins either side of
the body text, to help improve readability.
The purchasing process is fairly smooth, with a simple "Add to Cart"
button on each product page, and an easy to follow checkout. The link
to the privacy policy from the checkout is a good idea. I would explain
the "Signup for our mailing list" option on the page, as it is not clear
what benefits the shopper will gain from signing up.
I noticed a couple of HTML oddities with the Shopping Cart link at the
top of each page. Firstly, the word "Shopping Cart" is there, above the
cart icon, but it's in white text so you can't see it! Secondly, on all
browsers I tried (except Internet Explorer), there is an ugly gray
border around the cart due to the table border being set to "1".
There are a couple of areas where the site could be optimized for
download speed. The "Free shipping" graphic is currently rendered as a
JPEG image, resulting in a file size of 10k. By re-doing this graphic
as an 8-color GIF or PNG-8 image, it should be possible to get the file
size down to 6k or even less.
Secondly, the menu options to the left of the page are rendered using
one combined graphic for each menu option's text and arrow. As the
arrow is repeated on every graphic, a saving could be made by rendering
the arrow as a separate image, and using this same arrow image for all
the menu options, next to the individual menu text images.
Overall, this e-commerce site is fairly easy to use and has a great
range of products. By tweaking the design and looking at some of the
user interface issues mentioned in this review, I'm sure they will be
able to increase their visitors' experience -- and their site's revenue!
About the Author:
Matt Doyle, ELATED.com
FREE Webmaster resources: http://www.elated.com/
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