I’ve decided to create a new series here on the Anubis Marketing blog called “Unsolicited Web Site Review”.

The reason for doing these “free” reviews is to help illustrate to my readers and potential clients what my design style and opinions are about various random websites on the internet. It’s not meant to belittle any other designers, but rather explain what I’d have done differently and why.

These are by no means going to be done in complete detail, as would be done with full website evaluations that we charge for. I’m not going to get into fixing code (though I’ll likely announce if it’s done incorrectly) or giving suggestions for SEO or marketing. This is just an objective, unsolicited design/functionality review. I’ll likely just do a search for some random topic and pick the first “ugly” website I can find, and go on a roll from there.

That said, let’s get started. Our first search was for the term “gift baskets”. Looking on page 10, I found Baskets of Faith, a Christian gift basket store.

A quick peek at the site and source code (HTML) tells me that this site is likely an OSCommerce store, and it’s definitely hosted by NetworkSolutions and is built with some kind of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The initial problems I see with this is that the site’s almost entirely done in javascript and poorly written code. I’ve taken a sample:

That, my folks, is poorly written code. Let me explain:

There are (way way way too many) instances of “font” tags that shouldn’t be in there - all colors, styles, and fonts should be managed by CSS classes, once, in the CSS file.

There is one website link that’s been split in half and linked to twice. “Ameri” and “casChristian.com”. The worst part is that the font tags all had to be repeated twice too. They’ve also styled and colored their spaces, which is just fanTAStic, isn’t it? In fact, I just colored in all the individual spaces in this sentence, and they’re all bright fuschia! Don’t you LOVE them!? Okay, so I didn’t do that, because I don’t want to waste page load time with stupid extra code like that, but I had you fooled for a second, didn’t I? Onward…

While looking at the code, let’s take a peek at that color of the font they’re using on a light grey background “#808080″.
It’s 50% grey, which in a block, looks something like this:

Not horrible in a block of color on a white background, right? Let’s take a look at it in some text, as taken from a clip on the site:

If I was the kind of person who thought that everyone in the world who did stuff like this was trying to game the search engines, I’d say that these people were trying to game the search engines. They don’t REALLY care if you click on any of those massive amounts of links in their footer… they want Google to see them. But they don’t want to get in trouble for hiding links, so they made them a different shade of grey. What little Stinky McStinkersons they are!

That said, they appear to have many many Christian themed online shops. Something else I think might be a bad idea. Not for any other reason than they’re likely built on the same account, hosted on same or similar servers, built the same way, and are technically fighting against each other for important keywords that they want to be found for.

They’ve likely done this sort of footer linking to all their sites FROM all their sites, and well as you might figure, Google hates that kind of thing too.

On to the rest of the design…

Sidebar links are not only different colors, but different sizes (often too small), full of too many keywords (which is equivalent to spamming the search engines), and are misaligned.

In fact, the whole site is out of alignment. Some stuff is justified, some left-aligned, some centered… it’s an alignment mess that my mechanic would charge me $65/hour to fix if my car were that screwed up. Some of the text even goes over designed-in boundary lines.

They’re also linking out to all their other stores here, trying to be “tricky” about it by embedding those links inside long lists of other links to different categories in their store.

Bottom line here? OSCommerce stores can be great, but they’re not too well designed. WYSIWYG editors are a clean coder’s nightmare. Designing in varying shades of all one color (in this case, grey, white, black) is absolutely boring and will definitely lead to “blindness”, meaning that people will get so tired of having to squint and search long, keyword filled lists for what they want that they’re leave.

This site needs to be cleaned up code-wise and color/design wise, organized, restructured, and marketed properly (as do all their other sites) in order to get them higher than page 10 in Google’s SERPs for “gift baskets”.

What are your thoughts on that site?

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