Critique our new website please

[TORQDSS]

We are starting a new website and I would like you guys to look through it and tell me:

what do you like?
what don’t you like?
is it easy to use?
can you find the cars quickly?
anything confusing?
anything you think could operate a little smoother?
etc.

BE NICE PLEASE!!

Some things won’t work just because this is simply the prototype site so don’t be surprised if you see some things not operating

www.basilwellsville.com

the actual site will be www.basilofwellsville.com btw

[Willybeen]

Looks good… very professional looking… I havent really navigated it much though… :tup:

[tpgsr]

Design:
-Not too bad, looks appealing to the eye.
-There is a lot happening on that homepage, and it is not only a little cluttered, but also semi overwhelming.
-Seems a little graphic and flash heavy (there is still a lot of people on slower connections, I would assume even more so out in the Wellsville area)
-Does not function at a lower resolution. If you back up to 800x600 the page is way to large horizontally to fit within a screen
-Press Ctrl ++ twice and watch what that does to the page. There are lots of vision impaired users that set their font settings up a level or two to make it easier to read sites. I have 2 that work in my office with me and it is not a large operation <50 people.

• The find a used car form is very nice, as for the Pre-approval form, I think that it would be well suited to be in a box with a white or very light blue/green color to seperate it from the rest of the page and tie the elements of it together better. The same goes with the service form. In fact it may not even be necessary to change the background on the form, just draw a box around it and voila.

Function:
-Pretty simple to navigate if you want to find something. There are multiple links to search out vehicles and since you are in the business of selling cars that is probably a plus.
-On your site feedback form i don’t like and believe that it is a deterrent to require e-mail and phone from a user. If you want feedback on the site let them do it anonymously. As a user i may not fill that out since i really have no intentions on buying a car from you, I just wanted to let you know that XYZ link was broken.

Security:
I did not dig through all of your source, but there is a lot of contact forms and other information grabbing resources. Are all of these protected to keep your mail or sql server free of attacks by spam bots? Or even worse an attack from someone who is intentionally trying to break the form to extract customer data?

I see that the designer is the cobalt group, is this a custom build or are they giving you a template that may also be used by a dealer out in California?

[TORQDSS]

@tpgsr

Design:
-Not too bad, looks appealing to the eye.
-There is a lot happening on that homepage, and it is not only a little cluttered, but also semi overwhelming.
-Seems a little graphic and flash heavy (there is still a lot of people on slower connections, I would assume even more so out in the Wellsville area)
-Does not function at a lower resolution. If you back up to 800x600 the page is way to large horizontally to fit within a screen
-Press Ctrl ++ twice and watch what that does to the page. There are lots of vision impaired users that set their font settings up a level or two to make it easier to read sites. I have 2 that work in my office with me and it is not a large operation <50 people.

• The find a used car form is very nice, as for the Pre-approval form, I think that it would be well suited to be in a box with a white or very light blue/green color to seperate it from the rest of the page and tie the elements of it together better. The same goes with the service form. In fact it may not even be necessary to change the background on the form, just draw a box around it and voila.

Function:
-Pretty simple to navigate if you want to find something. There are multiple links to search out vehicles and since you are in the business of selling cars that is probably a plus.
-On your site feedback form i don’t like and believe that it is a deterrent to require e-mail and phone from a user. If you want feedback on the site let them do it anonymously. As a user i may not fill that out since i really have no intentions on buying a car from you, I just wanted to let you know that XYZ link was broken.

Security:
I did not dig through all of your source, but there is a lot of contact forms and other information grabbing resources. Are all of these protected to keep your mail or sql server free of attacks by spam bots? Or even worse an attack from someone who is intentionally trying to break the form to extract customer data?

I see that the designer is the cobalt group, is this a custom build or are they giving you a template that may also be used by a dealer out in California?

Cobalt is actually becoming the sole website provider for all GM dealers so if they don’t have them now they will have them soon. We are getting a pretty big price break because of it. We are able to choose from a group of templates so it may be tough for us to change anything but those are great thoughts. I wasn’t sure whether to post this up by i am electronically retarded so I figured that I should ask those who knew best… “Huge Nerd Corner” is pretty tough to resist…jk

GREAT THOUGHTS ON SECURITY.

I just copied this to the person in charge of the website project and told them to take a look. Thats exactly the kind of things I need to hear so thank you very much. It always better to have an unbiased third party look at these things and give honest feedback.