martin said:
I would be willing to trade a shirt for a review from solmu. I imagine there are some other thick-skinned folks out there that would also be interested in doing this.. The reivew could be done after the shirt is received so that it could include shipping, packageing and quality of the shirt as well..
I'm quite sure Rodney wouldn't appreciate me parlaying posts on his forums into what amounts to money. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea myself. I like free stuff as much as the next guy, so if people want to PM me free stuff I may take it. I'm happy to give feedback on the item and shipping. Like I said though, I'm not going to solicit and anything I post is obligation-free.
Twinge said:
Man, I was doing in-depth site reviews on these forums before Solmu even signed up! Ah, well...
I guess you were too civil to attract as much attention

I don't think I'd regard that as a bad thing.
Twinge said:
If I didn't have much to say about your site before it probably means I thought it was pretty good, but I'll take another look at it here.
That is exactly the problem. I rarely respond to critique requests because I'm not that interested in saying "decent site, not perfect, but pretty good" - which is what I'd be saying 99% of the time.
I like PaperPlain - always have. Do bear that in mind, but with that said I'll see what I can find I don't like...
The "Tribe.net: T-SHIRT j u n k i e" stuff you have in your news feed is strange and very offputting. I'm not at all convinced a commerce site even needs a newsfeed, and it can certainly be harmed by one that's not maintained properly. Personally I'd just drop the newsfeed feature entirely.
Each page has a block of blank space at the bottom. It's big enough to be annoying and best removed if possible (but small enough that it's not a disaster).
I like that your links page is called "Other sites.". I'm not a huge fan of the prevalance of links pages, and I think it's a classier way of putting it.
Your contact page is good - it doesn't require extra information I don't want to volunteer, and the text inputs are a good size.
In the about page, "All our animal t-shirts shirts" is a tautology, which is bad. I think "with eminently stylish (some would say emo) designs" covers your bases nicely. The "Our current designs, [big list of designs] represent" is annoying. It's obvious this page was written for SEO and not for human consumption. It should be able to do both, and long lists of obvious information are not human friendly.
"represent a stategic shift in the mindset" is too corporate mission statement. "awesome t-shirt colours" is awkward, and I imagine again it's there for search engine keywords. T-shirt colours aren't really awesome... if you must use the word, I'd suggest finding somewhere else to put it.
"The T-Shirt market, and animal t-shirt market in particular, have in recent years seen a drastic decrease in self realized t-shirts." is going to be meaningless babble to most customers. "These efforts are pre-destined to dramatic failure." is overwrought, whereas the next sentence "Who realy wants a stupid looking photo of a tiger head that fades at the edges on the front of a black t-shirt?" is brilliant. It is candid, simple, and something your target market will entirely agree with, which will build ties to your product. It also has a typo (realy). I haven't noticed many typos, but it never hurts to run those pages through a spellchecker. You wrote "aualities" towards the end of the page.
Overall your About page is good, but I think it should be gone over to make it more human friendly.
From the FAQ page: "Random questionbs", suggesting it definitely wouldn't hurt to quickly run your pages through a spellchecker. The typos are minor, but no typos is always better.
Personally I prefer a FAQ to be all on one page. I tend to be interested in multiple areas (e.g. a customer may want to see the size chart and the payment methods). I really like how easy you've made it for people to ask a question to be added to the FAQ. In general your site aims to keep pages in nice managable chunks. Combine that with the text input box for new FAQs, and I guess you have good reason not to have it all on one page. I don't know... it's probably better the way you have it now, it's just that normally that's not how I prefer it.
In shipping faq: $7,00 should be $7.00. "Yes, it cost $5" should be costs. Also, having a return charge is controversial (though I can easily see why one would do it and it's entirely up to you)... unless that's just the charge to post back the new item (i.e. not an additional service charge), in which case you should probably clarify that a little. "receeive" should be receive.
From the payment faq: "a animal" should be "an animal", "and mail it out once we have made the deposit" should be "once you have made" or "once we have received" (I prefer the 2nd).
On the t-shirts faq: "Are we realy selling" should be "Are we really", and I think this would be a good place to have a sizing chart.
Animals faq: This is a really interesting idea, I like it. I assume it's partly to get hits from search engines, and I think it's a good way to do it. It's rude to even bring this up, but I will anyway: I assume you wrote this stuff yourself or have permission to post it. If you didn't, then fix that immediately. If you did, good job. I think this section could be expanded. It would be too much work and too boring to have that level of depth on every animal, but if you could formulate a dot point list of interesting and/or amusing trivia or characteristics that would be good (just one list for all the animals, not a bunch of points per animal).
Random faq: This answer was getting a little too serious, but was saved by the note in square brackets. This is as good a time to mention it as any: I like your model shots. They're unpretentious and they get the job done.
Learn: Good use of free resources. While I believe Wikipedia does allow reproduction, I think they require some more documentation about the works' copyright status. I've never looked into it myself, so I don't know. If you've already done that and have it covered, cool. (whichever way you look at it this isn't a big deal - it's an open-source encylopaedia and you've credited the source - but I'm not sure if it fully meets their requirements for use).
Obviously the sitemap is A) Good, and B) Out of date.
The news section has typos (I only noticed the one "avialable" but didn't read through most of it).
For some reason the images on your site don't cache. So every time I load a new page it reloads the images from your server, or if I'm looking at product shots and mouseover back and forth between two photos it will reload them each time. I can't tell how big they are (because they're not cached), but the filesize *seems* really good. Still, on dialup this reloading would be a problem and it'll use more of your bandwidth than it needs to. Now, whether or not this problem is my end or yours I couldn't say, but I've never experienced it my end before (which is not to say it's not, but it might be worth a quick look so see if it happens when you browse).
Now... onto the content.
Your About page has the line "Out first line of T-Shirts, animals," and I remember even the first time I visited your site I was excited by the prospect that this was your first line of clothing - not the only thing the site did. I like the design philosophy behind the company (simplicity, essence, etc.) and wanted to see that applied to other concepts.
Visiting your page now, it seems like all you do is animal tees. The animal thing is cool, but I want more. When I buy t-shirts I aim to buy several (I get the impression this is unusual though) because I live in Australia and I want to save on shipping costs. What I'm looking for (again, maybe I'm not typical) is variety.
Essentially I'm questioning your current business model here without the benefit of knowing your sales or future plans... so obviously this should be taken with a grain of salt and feel free to ignore me.
Anyway, my personal opinion on what you should do is this: stop making new animal designs. You've done a lot of them and quantity is not originality. I'd phase out a couple of the older ones that aren't doing too well. Then I'd introduce the first shirts in your new 2nd line of clothing. Then I'd cut back to a few core favourites in the 1st line (always selling some animal t-shirts in other words, but not as many as there are now), and expand the 2nd line. Rinse, repeat, end up with a lot of variety.
Obviously this depends hugely on finances, marketing, sales, etc. But my opinion is that it's probably time to start expanding. You're already starting to paint yourself into a corner with the animal thing, and soon there won't be room to breathe. You're already at the point where you may get customer resistence if you tried to expand, and that's only going to get harder. I think selling the same animal shirts day in day out would get dull and it's time to expand... you may like your business exactly as it is and think I'm being rude, so that's for you to decide.
Now, the most important thing for me to end on is this: I actually
like your site. When I concentrate on finding problems for you to fix it turns out I can find quite a lot, but there's a lot you're doing right. The basic layout, the colour scheme, your product design, your concept, your company philosophy, the size and shape of your pages (I like the rounded corners on the menus), the attitude, etc. are all well done. Overall I think you have a good unique company image, which not many sites can claim. You're inoffensive & "family friendly" (or whatever you want to call it) without being dull. (I do particularly like your Multiply shirt by the way). If the time comes for you to get a company logo and go that extra step (whether it's being stocked in stores, advertising more widely, or whatever) I think you're well positioned to do so.
(two hours and 1700+ words later I remember the other reason I don't do site critiques

)