Evaluation of web sites

Website name: Information on MOT testing

Website link: E17MOT

About the website: This website appears to be designed for an independent garage, however there’s no clear indication of this until the “about page” (bottom of the navigation bar), even then you need to read the address on the “home/index” page to find out the name of the garage. Seems they concentrate on MOTs, Hand car wash and campaigning against “big” petrol companies. Oh and flying…

Likes:
Loading times - it loads quickly, but it has no reason not to, images are few and far between and there’s no multimedia content in sight.
Important sentences in bigger font – This is something I find used in a lot of magazines, an important sentence is repeated in bigger font to capture the eyes, in hope to draw you in to read more.

Dislikes:
The navigation bar - Yay! Something that isn’t static and bland – only done badly. The buttons don’t seem to fit the theme at all, then there’s the grey rectangle around them which doesn’t match the background. Also, I think it must be some protection feature of IE; you need to click on them once before they even work as links. I will give one good point, many links like this requires you to sit thru the animation before you can use them – not so here.
Navigation in general – The navigation bar has many of the main pages, however some are only found at the bottom of the “about us” and “hand car wash” pages.
“Old” feeling – the website feels like it was made some years ago, maybe it’s been lost in cyberspace for a few years and not enough uni student click “next” on google when searching for rubbish websites for website design work :p
The use of frames - I still see websites making good use of frames, but this one needs some improvement. The white lines give the impression it’s by default, but the designer may have wanted it like this. Also when changing window size it can screw the visibility of content. I just quickly validated the HTML (http://validator.w3.org/) as frames always used to cause me problems, what do you know, causes problems for this guy too.
Font – It’s not very professional, and it’s often a basic choice for beginners, don’t get me wrong it suits some websites. But this is meant to be promoting a garage, some professionalism wouldn’t go amiss.
Images -They are just too small to see detail, turning the small pictures into a hyperlink to open a new window with the full image would make details visible and keep the website from being one big image.
The content – Some pages are pretty good, such as the hand car wash page. Short and straight to the point, also gives pricing and talks it up (as much as you can talk up a hand car wash). But again the design annoys me so much I don’t really want to read the content, nor remember it.

Conclusion:
The design really bugs me; it just seems old, bland and boring. More colour would be helpful, more adult/professional feel to the font and theme in general would also win it a few more gold stars. Its all centred, no real thought put into placement.
If the site was to be done again the content, and some of the ideas, could be used again – but the theme and appearance needs to be changed in order to be successful.

Grade: 5/10 - That’s with added points for sympathy (the poor buggers got me with “Some thoughts from a long suffering petrol station operator”)