What do you think of www.rlights.com ?

http://www.rlights.com

Hi all,
anyone care to give some comments on our website? We sell about every type of ceiling fan and lighting fixture you can imagine (about 9,000 products right now with more on the way) What I'm mainly after are comments on the layout and usability of the site. Is it easy to navigate? do all the features work properly? what other features should it have, etc.

Oh, and also give me your comments on my forums at www.rlights.com/forum

The website and forum were both coded entirely by me in ASP or asp.net. (The new stuff is in asp.net, and I'm converting some of the most viewed pages to .net as well)

My goal is to make this site simple, yet powerful and feature rich and very user friendly. I hate sites that have stuff all over them and you can't find what you're looking for and deluge you with other offers, promotions and all that nonsense *cough* Amazon *cough*.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

the site looks nice and friendly... here are the comments:
1. when viewing item details (e.g. viewdescription.asp?ItemNum=9855&Cat=CeilingFans) there is no thumbnail but rather the big picture itself - no point in enlarging unless the original is really big
2. many thumbnails are missing when viewing category (e.g. viewitems.asp?cat=CandleHolders&page=1 Pacific Coast Kathy Ireland) - you better have some default picture.
3. when viewing page higher than the page count, you better display the maximum page (viewitems.asp?cat=CandleHolders&page=99999 would show page #2)
4. such link: viewitems.asp?cat=fdfdfdd&page=99999 is causing error:

hackers use such methods to get details, you better prevent such errors by checking if the recordset is empty.
5. FATAL: you're not dealing with sql injection attacks in the login page (customerlogin.aspx) - deal with the attacks by verifying the input or using Parameters instead of pure SQL code.
6. light switch: coool!
7. your html is not standard and probably fails in validator... this is the WSM job so I leave this to him to give more details.
8. in the Contact Us, I would expect some kind of "instant message" that can be sent or short feedback form - really easy to implement.


bottom line, very nice website really great job to do alone.

Thanks for the tips and suggestions. I'm glad you pointed out the errors with the paging and of course the sql injection attack. I thought I had the customer login page to not allow that, but I think I just had the idea in my head but forgot to put it in the code.

As for the pictures, the picture resize thing is a little funny, and I'm going to be fixing it to show smaller images. As for thumbnails not showing up, I actually don't put the products on the website. We have some other employees that work in that area, and apparently they forgot to upload the thumnails. But a default thumbnail image is definitely a good idea for when things like this happen.

I'm not sure what you mean by my html being non-standard. What is non-standard about it? Currently everything works in FireFox, IE, Netscape, and Opera. I'm not sure about other browsers as I haven't had the opportunity to try them.

Again thanks for the comments, and especially for finding those security flaws.

Lazy arse

Quick overview:

110 HTML errors:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbo...ww.rlights.com/

3 CSS errors/warnings:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/...ww.rlights.com/

Nice code indenting, but non-semantic, you use <table> to control page layout and don't separate content from presentation properly. Although I do appreciate that this would take considerable effort with your chosen layout.

That's all I can say for now. In the meanwhile, try chiselling away at those validation errors.

Interesting, I never knew there was such a place. A lot of those errors are simple slips in typing, which should be easy to fix. But I'm not actually that worried. Forums.aspfree.com has 867 errors.

yep nice, site and since everyone else has covered most of the points ( not that i would have thought of them anyway ), my only small point is alot of your thumbnails are pixalated, and may detract from the over al feel of the site.

Keep it up

cool avatar Davey!
Hyrum - as you probably understand by now, having non standard code is not fatal and the pages would still "work", but it means that future browsers may not support your pages and also in browsers like FireFox which are more strict about standards you may have problems in the design.

another approach to how you can think of standard code is that it's more... correct - like having remarks in the code, having proper indentation and such.

thanks

I was able to generate overflow errors on your shopping cart.