Website for Kitchen worktops client

[behzad]

Fair Annoyance removed and so will be Under Construction. Been busy with client work but need to get my site up and ready. Peace

[pauland]

This site was recently produced using Bootstrap (not by me).

I think it's an example of sites not having to look the same.

http://tramastudio.mx/

[Cloud]

The problem is that a site can look however one wants it to look but at the end of the day, the client wants the site to look good, not be different for the sake of it, there is such a thing as user experience, and sites like tramastudio work for a creative company but a client would balk at it. site visitors expect certain things; easy navigation, fast loading, and no distractions, whoever decided to have the damn music in the background needs a good talking to. Too much 'creativity' may be good for the designer or the client even but when it comes to the actual site visitor then certain rules have to be followed.

Also, we only use the theme because Wordpress demands a theme, the actual website is created from a blank, very few professionals use themes, site builders have allowed them to create as they wish without all the restrictions and bloat of a theme. Plus with some pagebuilders, one has as much or more freedom to design as one wishes. Any element can be placed anywhere using absolute positioning. But at the end of the day, the site visitor is the king, we don't want them annoyed by music, we don't want them waiting forever for 'effects' to load and we certainly don't want them getting confused with how to navigate the website.

[Cloud]

Just to show why a website is designed a certain way and why user experience is essential (speed is a massive contributor to user experience) Here are screenshots of the ssf worktops site and the trama studio site, notice the speed difference? And the page file size difference. A business website's goal is always to sell a service or a product, one can't sell a product or service if the potential customer is confused, annoyed or sat around waiting for the website to load. K.I.S.S.

[behzad]

I totally agree with you Cloud. I always admired your work and by no means meant to put your work down. I was just mentioning how web creators and not designers, which sadly everyone can design a website from a template do not consider the pointers you have mentioned because they are not educated in SEO and UXI etc...

Also the few sites I did for my clients using xara all have gotten low scores with the site that you did the testing with. All the scores are due to the output of Xara. Things like Leverage browser caching ,Combine images using CSS sprites,Defer parsing of JavaScript, Optimize the order of styles and scripts and so on. I also hear that Xara is focusing in the future on more SEO optimization, I could be wrong but read it somewhere.

[pauland]

Interesting points.

6MB of the download is the MP3 soundtrack.
The background of the site is 1.5MB, so we are up to 50% of the download with just those two items.

I'm not holding this site up as the perfect site, I provided the link to show that using a framework such as bootstrap doesn't mean you have to have a site of little boxes that is the same as any other.

I refute the notion that all sites need to be designed to sell commodities.

I have passed back the payload issues to the site designer and added a few of my own.

[pauland]

Our downloader friend came to TG via viet-nam, not Austria. I would give those links a miss.