Site review please

[car-buyingtips]

Hello
Could I get a site review please? http://www.car-buyingtips.com
Thank you
Bill Dearn

[WebSavvy]

The first thing I'd suggest is to lose the pop-overs and pop-unders. There are already more than enough of those everywhere on the Internet now.

Most people (myself included) once annoyed by the pop-overs and pop-unders will quickly leave without even staying to see what your site has to offer. You don't want to chase away sales before you have the chance to even get their attention.

Is this site some sort of an affiliate program?

[scottiecl]

Hi Bill-

My first suggestion would be to use a spell checker and make sure you are using the word you mean (personnel vs personal).

Kill the pop-under.

People either have filters to block these or they are annoyed by them or even worse for your users, confused by them. I had someone tell me the other day that they didn't like to use the Internet because there are "all these screens keep opening that I don't know what to do with". I do believe pop-ups and pop-unders are intimidating a whole class of internet user into going back to the newspaper and yellow pages.

On your top nav bar- it looks like you could spread things out a little so that your "Link to Us" and "Automotive Sites" links don't wrap to a second line.

The grey links on blue background are low contrast- difficult to see on some monitors. Maybe if you changed the grey to white and possibly bold the link text. Visited links turn dark grey and become practically invisible.

Navigation links- some are in all lower case, some mixed with upper and lower case. Try either one or the other- all lower or proper titles with the first letter in uppercase.

Links in your text area ought to be a color- not black. Again, that is confusing to some internet users who won't click on black text.

How about breaking up some of the text into bulleted lists of relevant headers? The big blocks of text are hard to read.

[OptWizard]

Pop unders work if used right

I use one for a client for a short form alterntive and get lost of applications through so do not be too quick to kill the pop under...

:-)

[Blue]

Hi car-buyingtips,

I would take all the advice of savvy1 and scottiecl! And I am putting forth a third vote to dump the pop-under, mainly for the reason that many ISP's (including AOL and Earthlink) now frown upon that tactic and even include technology that renders them useless. They are annoying, and, the information can be presented in a way that avoids the annoyance factor.

A few other observations:

Some of your pages don't render well at 800x600 resolution, in that there is the dreaded horizontal scroll. Some of these pages are: "Car Insurance Savings", and "Leasing Your Next Car".

Your navigation structure could be better thought out as not all the links in it remain the same on all pages. This can be confusing. Further, the nav bar moves up and down in position on different pages. I like to see the nav bar stationary and have it include all the same links for each page. If you need to have different links on different pages, try working with a DHTML menu structure.

The nav links don't stand out enough and are somewhat hard to read.

I was surprised to click on one or two of the links in the nav bar and suddenly found myself on another website. I suggest you have those links separate from the internal links, and have them open in a new window.

You may wish to move the "Search" and "Site Map" utilities into a more prominent position, maybe to the top of the navbar, or in the navbar that has the "main" link.

I would move the Corvette image up to the top left corner of the page, and would center the banner over the table it's in.

Some of the pages are long and have no easy navigational aid to help the surfer back to the top of the page where the navbar is. Two methods of alleviating this are to include some "Top" or "Up" links and to have a second (textual) navbar at the bottom of each page. I use both, as anything that helps your sites' visitors navigate easier is a good thing.

You might wish to hire a professional proof-reader.

Hope all this helps! :cheers:

[maartenvr]

Another thing I would do is eliminating the right click disable function. There is many people out there that use it for many things. One of them is opening a link in a new window. This way your visitors can actually stay on your site while they browse one you have linked to.
The way I found out is I like using the scroll-button on my mouse to move up and down the page. This doesn't work either. Now I am forced to use the arrows on the right. You should make everything as easy for your visitors as possible.

Another thing is your link exchange. I did not see any links on your pages to a links page. I thought you would have one because you offer to exchange links (and because I know from another forum you use Zeus :) ). It is important to link to your links pages for search engine crawling purposes and also to send your link exchange partners some traffic back. Linking to your links pages will also make potential link partners want to link to you more.

[car-buyingtips]

I just wanted to thank all of you for your time. I will make the changes you mentioned. On the links page I have a link on all my pages the link is "Automotive Directory" Obviously this is hard to find since it wasn't found when looking over the site.