Review Request: car repair shop / car parts store websites

[feltcap]

Hi,

I am a noob, please don't bite.

These are my first 2 websites I have made for a car repair shop and their parts department. I use PHP and vim. Cooler features include the front end controller and cruft free URLs.

Areas for improvement likely include the CSS and redesigned comments / contact pages. There are also some cross browser compatibility issues I have found using some versions of IE7.

Any comments are appreciated!

universityforeigncar.com
cheqflag.com

Thanks in advance !

[quartzy]

I had a look at your sites, and to be frank they are a little boring. You have chosen colours that are not very bright and dull.

The first site, is not very appealing, with the large amount of gray, I would break this up with white, and the text does not have too much padding around it, which makes it hard to read and a little scrunched up. Perhaps make the site wider maybe, so not too long to scroll down and easier to read.

I would also place the address and logo up in the header and get rid of the car, which does not look too cool. Logo's are usually placed to the left of the header. Though these days people are doing all sorts.

I would change the navigation too, as it does not look very exciting with large gaps around each link. On the second site it is possible to line up the email and subject boxes using css, and the label element, this would look much better. I use FF browser and the layout seems OK to me.

But if you are new it is a good beginning.

[SB65]

Re universityforeigncar.com:

1. If I were to view your homepage on a 'standard' laptop, then there's very little information above the fold. You might want to move some of it up a bit. The blue bird logo, which I assume is for twitter, would be be better turned into a link with a title of 'Follow Us'. I'd personally dispense with the grey bar as well, as the user may consider that this is not content - it's inconsistent with the rest of the site where the content is displayed on a white background.

2. Links - your menu 'Home' links to http://universityforeigncar.com/home/ - which Google will see as a different page than http://universityforeigncar.com/. You should change you link to just '/'. Wordpress normally takes care of this itself, not sure why it hasn't here - maybe it's not set correctly on your WP installation.

3. Links again - the link to Contact Us on your home page goes to http://blog.universityforeigncar.com/contact-us/, whereas the menu goes to http://universityforeigncar.com/blog/. Again, Google will see these as two different pages, and may even penalise the listing for duplicate content.

4. You are missing a closing p tag here:

<p class="textwidget"><address>2621 E. Kalamazoo<br />
Lansing, MI 48912</address>
<p class="tel-numbers">517-484-3111</p>

Hope that's helpful...
Getting a 404 on your other page.