Button Machine Site

[buttonexpressions]

Hello All!

I am new to the forum and I would appreciate your valuable feedback on the look and navigation of my site. Thank you very much for your help!

Tecre Button Machine, Button Maker Supplies and Parts

Also, if anyone knows how I can move the chat button to the right of the search bar, I would greatly appreciate the help. Thank you.

[gsisco]

Hi! I'm glad you posted! I can definitely recommend some things for you to improve your navigation and the look and feel.

Here's some information about your chat link and search bar area:

Your site starts in a table, which is wrapped in an HTML div tag called "introtext". That table has just one row with two cells. The chat button is in that second cell.

The search form is just below your header, in a different HTML tag.

But that doesn't answer your question. The answer to that is:

This is something that most likely can be changed in the RTML fairly quickly, but it requires changing the templates a little bit, and you really need to be careful if you don't know RTML.

If you want my opinion, it would be worth your time to give Solid Cactus a call and get this done for you. If there are other small changes like this that you would like as well, you could get it all done in one shot.

I also think it really depends on your overall needs for this site. I think your site is very well done - very straight forward with how it works and and looks. Simple designs work well - it's so easy to see what you're looking at so the product can stand out and the site doesn't get in it's own way.

BUT

For some of the things, like this page:
Tecre Graphic Punch Machine

You could turn these section pages into items with options:

You could have one page for that item, with one picture, and take care of the different options by setting those up as options to be selected by the customer. If you did that, you could change the first three button sections into their own items and have one section that could contain those three. Then, you would have a lot less pages and items to maintain, but the same amount of variety.

Options for an item can be easily set up by editing the page. Obviously, you would need to add a base price and change some other things to make the page look the way you wanted.

I would make a new test item and play with it to see it you can get it looking the way you want.

See where I'm going with this? Basically, I don't think you necessarily need a redesign of your site, but I think there are a few things you could do to improve the navigation.

About, my advice to set things up as options of a single item. I realize that each image has subtle difference, but so does your customer. A click to enlarge feature with multiple insets could solve that if it's a real sticking point. But I feel this would improve the look and feel of your site and make it feel less like looking through a huge matrix of the same thing over and over with slight variations.

Don't get me wrong, it's not as if you have to choose one or the other. You could keep all the pages you have and also design new pages set up the way I suggest, to test it out and see if you like it that way.

Hope this helps. As I said, I like the overall simplicity of your site. I think the chat button could be moved fairly easily if you're familiar with RTML, and if not, very quickly by us. Finally, I think instituting options on single items would condense your left navigation a little, as well as cut down on the amount of work when maintaining your items.

By the way, I was going to mention your color palette. I would use more of the colors from your logo throughout the site, rather than just the blue alone. You could make your links green, or maybe the fonts in your left navigation window yellow, etc.

At any rate, nice job on your site. I wish you much success! Hope this helps!