spleen Online Shop Design

Woo someone used cu3er - I feel like I saw a jQuery solution to this somewhere...Ok getting back on track, here are some suggestions:

First thing that drew my eye was of course the cu3er and then I saw the shopping cart on the top right, thinking neat I can buy stuff.

So I clicked on Category cuz hey what do I know you sell? cept fine arts reproduction. Perhaps you should make the Shop by Category first, so people know what options you have and then Artists.

After clicking on a category, I saw alot of ratings and thought it was very cool you can rate, I clicked on the star and nothing happened. I also like the sorting option, very nice.

I clicked on an item and hovered around a bit and got an odd zooming box to the right, covering all the menu options and noticed you had a lightbox modal but there was no next button that I could click to get to the next image.

I tried to rate an image just for fun and noticed I couldn't do it again + there was no call to action button such as Buy.

I looked around the navigation and hovered on My spleen - interesting heading and lo behold I found the login and create an account link. Personally, these should be somewhere prominent, preferably on the home page somewhere or in the nav, so people know you have to register/login. Some people just may go through your site and try to buy an item, but they can't because there's no buy button.

So my suggestion would be to have: More prominence for the login/create an account button/link somewhere on the site Some friendly e-commerce options such as buy here The image zoom isn't working out for me all too well so you may want to reconsider how to go about it.

There are a few things that stick out to me, however.

The shopping cart icon is placed besides the search bar and below that there's "Your Shopping Cart" which I tried to click on but nothing happened. I think it'll be confusing to have those two apart from each other (although they're pretty close). Why not have a button for the search form and then place that cart icon beside the text and make both a link? Then again, I can't seem to add any items to the cart so I can't see how that portion is supposed to work once you have items in the cart.

For the navigation, I noticed that there is an arrow that appears when you hover over the links so I think that there are more links under that item but nothing appears. It is common to use such a symbol to show that there are more options so I would remove that to avoid confusion.

The "Sort by" pull down could be placed elsewhere because as it is, the header is too close to it. A suggestion I have is to align the pagination to the left and align the pull down to the left or vice versa.

Like I said, it's a good design. The colors aren't too strong as to distract from the art. The thumbnails are big and I like the zoom feature. I would so shop here if I could afford the art!

mike

I love this, it's so clean and fun…

my only critique would be the drop down menu, I would suggest making it a horizontal nested menu, and maybe not such a extreme purple color.

Other than that Brilliant!

1.) "Cutting edge artists" doesn't describe what you are selling. The artists may feel avant garde, but this kind of work has its history in German Expressionism (e.g. Kathe Kollwitz), Surrealism and some is even evocative of the work of H.R. Giger. So get rid of it. I would try language that is more accurate and descriptive (make up a new label if you have to) : Gothic, new-age machinery, apocalyptic, dark story telling, 21st-century surrealism, etc.

2.) You have capital and lower case letters, both, leading words under "Fine Art Reproductions" "Artist Profiles", "Online Shop", etc.. Consistency is needed. Consider having a copy editor take a quick look at the text throughout your site.

3.) Is the tab entitled "We care" in the header a joke? I'm looking at eviscerated and mechanized bodies (which is fine) but your tab title is wholly inconsistent with that.

4.) Nice presentation of your product/artwork. Once the right audience finds you, you'll be off like a rocket!

I like the low profile header/navigation.

Huge image with realistic-ish drop shadow is nice.

Next bar breaks it up and gives is a little room to breathe.

After that, it seems a bit bare. I would like to see the something more like the second page layout there. The "Featured Artist" section seems out of place.

The interior pages are very well laid out and appear easy to navigate.

Even though I am not sure I like the artworks, I think your web design is quite in harmony with the product you're selling. Therefore I like your design.

There are some minor things which occurred to me as not that good:

If you move your mouse to the row "High Quality Fine Art..." there is a tooltip "You have in your cart". I don't have anything in my cart. So this confused me. Then I clicked on it and got to the shopping cart which again confused me. "Shopping cart" is on the right - so why is the whole row associated with the shopping cart? Why is this little white edge above the Q of Quality. It does not make sense to me.

The detail zoom of a picture appears right next to the picture hiding the title, the prize and some more information. Maybe this is due to my browser (Firefox 3.6.2). This zoom does not look good then (I hope I can make myself clear)

On the same page (I viewed Glasshead) you can toggle the images you want to see. Unfortunately they are not always the same size (as in the example of Glasshead). Then the mousover changes the image and the relative position of the mouse changes. Maybe you can make sure that all pictures are the same size?

By the way the image with the media (which must be Alu-Dipond Plex, I guess) has a tooltip "image2" and does not have a title, so I first was confused what this has to do with the artwork "Glasshead".

When you click on the image, it opens and reads "Image 1 of 3" - even though there are only 2 images.

search: It took me a while to realize that the space on the top right is a search box. Maybe you should make this more obvious. I first did not even know I can type in there. Maybe write into the textbox "Search..." or something.

I hope my comments help you.