New Website! Brick Lane Bikes.co.uk

After quite a long time we have finally finished the website to a standard that can allow visitors. The site is always going to be a bit in development cause we want to keep it up to date all the time, with new products and new features...

So, go along and see what you think, let us know what you think is missing or if there is any info which you think has to be in there.

As I said we are going to be building this all up over time - this is essentially a BETA site with all the initial info and basic designs..... so go go go go!

Brick Lane Bikes

Nice.

One anal web developer thing - some of the images are kinda large and load a bit slow (424k - http://bricklanebikes.co.uk/home/images/74.png) I'd increase the compression.
http://bricklanebikes.co.uk/home/images/43.png and http://bricklanebikes.co.uk/home/images/57.png and http://bricklanebikes.co.uk/home/images/67.png are large too.

The Click Me/Close me on the homepage to bring up shop details should be renamed.
I'd also have a separate menu like "Where are we" or "Contact Us" which has this info under it as well - just so peeps can find this important info quickly.
I work on some retail websites and know how much 'opening hours' type info gets hit.

The mailto link on the homepage paragrah has a typo (in the actual link - "mailtp"):
"If you have any problems using the site or if you think there is something missing and you’d like us to include it as it’s super new please let us know, and we’ll look into it straight away."

On the http://bricklanebikes.co.uk/home/clothing page the "Track & Fixed Wheel" heading is messed up - not showing the ampersand.

"Site by Leaf" link at the bottom of http://bricklanebikes.co.uk/home/gallery doesn't work. On this page you also lose your top menu so users have to click back button to return to your main site.

Now I'm off to the pub.. ;)

No, I'm just a pedantic sh!t
(and a software engineer gone web developer) :)

lol, thanks Hippy - these are exactly the sort of things we test for :-)

We have a very fast image server, at least I thought we did have...... I'll look into it, they are very slow...

Rounded boxes, gradient fills, sans-serif fonts, drop shadows. It's all a bit Web2.0, innit? ;-)

It's nice. You do have a typo on the clothing page, though: ; amp ; should be & amp ;

you don't see many 2.0 bike shops now do u ?

yeah, the colors are very nice. But to me the fonts are way to big. just a matter of taste..
I like the 2.0 OSX look to it. ibike... LOL.
From the source it does not look like you are using a CMS at all. Is it all static content ?
If you plan to grow or make frequent changes it it there is nice simple systems in PHP
that are free and very practical editing pages
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Content_Management/index.html
I know TYPO3 scares most people off. You could even use wordpress to do it.

But nice work !

Design critique: The whole thing feels kinda big. If you're set on one column that's cool, but it gives some very long line lengths (~25 or more). You have large spacing between paragraphs, but too little leading, so the paragraphs end up very wide, short and bunched up. The justified text worsens things because it messes up the tracking. I do like the colours though and the graphic treatment is nice. The front page is pointless, consider leaving "Click to enter" in the 90s.

I like the icon with the world champion stripes next to the address url - a touch of class!

its made in iweb if im not mistaken?

jonaent (Jon) lol, thanks Hippy - these are exactly the sort of things we test for :-)
We have a very fast image server, at least I thought we did have...... I'll look into it, they are very slow...

Glad you appreciate it. I thought you might tell me to fsck off but you did ask for comments :)
It's not the server speed, it's the size of the images you're serving. They're just too big for a commercial website.
I wanna get in, look at stuff and get out, quick. That's the other reason you need to have a separate spot for Opening Hours and Address - make it obvious too.
Maybe one day I'll actually make it into the shop - do you work there?

I do bits and bobs and do their website stuff, I just make sure they have something out there, to raise their presence online because It's a cool shop, it's really the only place in London like it... small, open 7 days a week until 7pm, and they really like their Italian steel frames - and they'll let u use their backyard to fix stuff on your bike!

i thought that deep v's would cost a lot more. i might have to put those on my wish list now.

I'll have to make an effort to walk past the cycle surgery near Liverpool St and get in there. Sounds more like my kinda shop.

smeear(smeear) its made in iweb if im not mistaken?

Do i have to get the iLife to have the iWeb? Do you have a copy of it?

I did not use iWeb! I coded it by hand.... all my hard work gone un-noticed ;-)....

Rob, I've never used it myself so I'm not sure - I think it comes as standard with all new Macs.... I have a new one, but I never installed it so I might have a copy somewhere, I'll have a look

I noticed it was coded by hand! Clean markup and you're not gonna get scriptalicious with iWeb. Sorry to be kinda harsh in my last post, I was trying to be helpful but read it back just now and I sound like a jerk. :-/

I wouldn't bother with iWeb, Roberto. It's very hard to make a site that's not in one of the default templates, and very hard to find a default template that actually suits your site. It's also a selling point for .Mac and a lot of the ease is taken away without a subscription. A limiting experience unless you want anything but the most basic of sites.

RapidWeaver is supposed to be iWeb done right. I've not used it personally though. If you want a blog however, side step all of these and use Wordpress.

Looks good! Colours are good, typefaces good. Like the 'Forum' link :) Agree that the line length is a bit long.
Also, when I went go the 'Gallery' page, in the blurb at the top, where the end of the paragraph reads 'Brick Lane Bikes', the word 'Bikes' was tracked out for some reason. I can't seem to reproduce it now - that paragraph comes out centred when 5 minutes ago it was justified - perhaps you just changed it right now?

A couple of things about the /home/ page: Firstly, on my browser (Firefox 2.0.0.4, Mac OS X) the on-hover white background only just comes up to the top of the characters - I mean, there's padding at the bottom but not at the top, so it looks a little odd. I don't know if this is a browser quirk or something you can fix in the css. Secondly, my screen being 1024x768, the home/ page comes out with the logo at the top nicely composed with the green box below it, but then I get just the tops of the two rounded Velocity/Surly boxes peaking out beneath it. It just struck me as a little odd as the top part of the page looks like a nicely composed 1 screen's worth of info, rather than one of those loo-roll type pages where it's obvious that you have to scroll down for more things. Don't really know what to suggest - that's just what I thought when I saw it.

ffub I noticed it was coded by hand! Clean markup and you're not gonna get scriptalicious with iWeb. Sorry to be kinda harsh in my last post, I was trying to be helpful but read it back just now and I sound like a jerk. :-/

You are right though....

We will be developing the site as we go along. The shop wanted the site up asap so that they could start working on their online presence, as they've got all sorts of stuff on offer that you can't get anywhere in else in UK, even Europe with their custom PAC bags and Velocity etc.

At the end of the day a lot of you guys will be visiting the site - they specialise in Track and fixed wheel - it's only right that you get a say in it somehow, that's the beauty of stuff like forums!

there's a langster in disguise there...nice work though, took your sweet time didn't you?
don't even bother trying to explain to me what sort of ordeal you had to go thru just to make this do that and so on...it'll be like talking to me about horses in arabic.

Where's this Langster Stef?

top right, premium alluminium fully customisable frame. not dissing the fact that is a langster though.

Agree with ffub.

It's kinda big. I'm sure you cold move down a point or two.

Not wishing to be rude, but the photography is so weak it undermines the site.

P.S. It's endura not andura