Gerry,
For a 15 year old kid he did an excellent job. I do have a number of comments and don’t take this as me taking shots at your son, this just happens to be what I do as part of my profession. Here are a few random comments.
1. The spacing between the elements in your primary navigation are not equal.
2. The third element on the primary navigation “Rollerball Pens†is longer than the image that sits behind it, I would recommend having the words stack on top of each other as opposed to spanning and spilling over the background image.
3. The alignment justification on the words in the navigation elements are inconsistent. For example the element “Links†is centered horizontally and vertically, but the element for “Pencils†is almost centered horizontally and it is top justified vertically.
4. Once you get into some of the secondary pages, the spacing on the navigation elements completely blows up. Particularly on the “about the artist†page, something with primary image is messing up the nav.
5. I’m sure you and your son are aware that the font of the primary navigation elements are different point sizes, in web design this is strongly recommended against. You would be better off choosing a single font size that would work universally across all the primary nav elements.
6. Another suggestion to help with the navigation is you could have one primary navigation element for “Pens†then with a mouse over have a secondary navigation for “Rollerballâ€, “Fountainâ€, and “Ballpointâ€. This would also help with some of the long text as mentioned above and with the point size issue.
7. One other thing I would do is I noticed that you are using paypal for your shopping cart; nothing wrong with that. I would give the potential customer an option to contact you on the order page before you get sent off to paypal. The reason for this is if someone is getting ready to drop $60+ on a pen they may want to ask you a question about it. I would have a button to add to the shopping cart and somewhere on that page a place for them to request more information or simply your contact info. The only place I was able to find your contact info was on the “About the Artist†page. Don’t make a potential customer have to struggle to contact you. You could solve this by putting a contact us link in the footer.
8. One last thought on your shopping cart and use of paypal. The current implementation is simply to open a new window to paypal. From a usability perspective it’s not the best experience. If I wanted to hit the back button on my browser and add another item I can not. I would at the very least try to incorporate the functionality of the shopping cart into an I-frame within your site and not lose control of the user experience.
]
