LO5: Evaluation

There was only one improvement that came up in the answers to my survey. This was that, on the homepage, one of the images for a product did not look the same as the other two images there. This is the image that was spoken about:

The middle image in this set of three is a different colour that the other ones, and it stands out. To me it makes the site seem a little less professional as it shows that the images were clearly not taken on the same day, or in the same location. However, the photographs that I used for my products were taken directly from the Small Machines site, and the Pimoroni store page. This means that they were taken by two different groups of people. To improve upon this I would get myself a set of the products from Small Machines and take my own photographs in an enclosed environment so that they all looked similar. I could have also used a program such as Photoshop to change the colours and saturation of the middle image in order to make it fit in with the other two.

Another possible improvement for me would be the load times of the pages. For this part I am mainly talking about my homepage. This is because, on the homepage, there are a lot of image and widgets that will greatly increase the load times of that page. Another example of a page with a lot of images would be the main products page. To reduce the load times, I could attempt to cut down on the amount of widgets that I have on the homepage, or even reduce the number of images on that page. This would mean that the client has to load less and, in turn, would reduce the time taken for the pages to load.

I would also like to go through my site and make sure that there isn't any one piece of information that is repeated multiple times, so that the user does not have to read the same text multiple times. An example of this is the About Us section on the homepage and the About Us page. There is some information there that I believe did not need to be repeated and, if I were to edit the site further, would remove from either of these two areas of the site to make it less repetitive.

Finally, I would like to remove the number of links on the homepage that link to the same places. For example, I have at least 3 links that all go to the products page of the site. This would help reduce the load times of the main homepage as there would be fewer links to other parts of the site that need to be loaded.