Feedback for The Bag Lady Homepage

I have created a homepage called the Bag Lady as part of an assessment for my course. I need at least 4 people or more to provide me as much feedback as I can in order to complete this assessment. Any suggestions, comments or feedback will be extremely helpful since it is required to make any changes for the final version of the homepage.

Thank You and Kind Regards
Starbreaker31
The Bag Lady Homepage Screenshots

My personal opinion is that I’m not satisfied with the color, try search “adobe color explore”.
you can find tons of color combination or make your own.

Next is thatd design is very plain, how about adding a header cover?
then look for free stock photos in unsplash.com to make it more alive. :slight_smile:

Try adding a fixed header. maybe a image at 100% width, but maybe 150 pixels in height.

Try using something other than default text. Search for a webfont to use.

I wish I could be more positive, but what you’ve designed is not working — at all. Sorry.

“The Bag Lady,” at first — at least to me — suggests a homeless woman, and there’s nothing on the pages to immediately dispel that first impression without reading through the text.

Speaking of the text, it’s, well, wordy and poorly written. You do not need to welcome anybody to your homepage, as you wrote it. “The Bag Lady ‘have’ sold
” Um, check your grammar. Visitors to the site won’t care about the store having sold handbags to the boutique market for several years, so why is that the very first sentence on the page? Visitors will come to look at handbags, not read a history lesson about the store. I could go on from there, but the text needs to be completely rewritten and shortened into something relevant to why shoppers are visiting the site.

What is the purpose of this website? Is it an e-commerce site designed to sell handbags? If so, why are the social media logos so large? I mean, you want people to look at the merchandise, not get distracted by heading off to a Twitter feed.

Since the site is about handbags, why are there no big, compelling photos of them to instantly convey to the visitor that this is a handbag website? You can’t sell merchandise online without good, compelling photos of what’s being sold.

The colors you’ve used are way too garrish. Red, pink and green, um, no — not for handbags.

Thanks for the feedback, but I do need to clarify some things that you are not aware of.

The Bag Lady is what the course I am doing has written down as part of the assessment. Therefore, I can’t change it because I agree, The Bag Lady is not a good title for a website. But if I were to do something like “The Lovely Store” or something like that, I would have to redo this assessment because it is not written down on the assessment. Another thing as well is that I am from Australia, so words like favourite, saviour and colours are going to be incorrect from an American’s perspective.

I appreciate your feedback though because you are right, the colours do not fit well when it comes to advertising handmade bags. I just want to let you know that the site name is not created by me, as well as the words are spelt differently because I live in a different country.

I was not referring to spelling and word usage differences between the US and Australia. Besides, I saw none of those differences in your examples. Instead, I specifically mentioned the bad grammar, such as mixing verb tenses, using plural and singular in the same sentence to refer to the same thing, sentence fragments, and errant possessive apostrophes and dashes. These kinds of grammatical conventions do not differ between Australian and American English — they’re just mistakes that should be fixed.

In addition, the writing, like I said, is wordy and often focused on the wrong things. The writing should clearly and concisely focus on engaging customers in ways that entice them to make purchases or follow through on calls to action.

If you’re in a design course, the emphasis is likely not on writing, but the writing in your examples is so atrocious that it really does need to be fixed since it undermines everything else that might be right about the design.

As for the name The Bag Lady, neither you nor I like the name, but I was not suggesting you change it. Designers rarely have the option of changing the name of a company — we just work with and around those things we can’t change. With that in mind, my suggestion was to include imagery on the front page to, among other things, immediately make apparent that this is the website of a company that makes and sells handbags.

Well, I had typed all of the content in Word and it does look fine to me. I really do think that there are differences between Australian and American in terms of Spelling and Grammar because I did check it and re-checked it again and it does seem perfectly fine. And like you said, there shouldn’t be too much information on there anyway, so I don’t understand what your problem is.

You are right about me trying to engage the customers, so they can be interested in what they are looking at, which I will make the changes for the final version.

No offense, but it doesn’t look like you are being professional when it comes to critiquing someone’s design. It sounds like you are bashing towards my design without giving a proper reason. What do you mean by atrocious? This is not the final version of my homepage anyway, it is just a rough draft or rough design that is a requirement of my assignment. Besides, I am changing the layout for the final design anyway, so there is no need for your rude comments about my work like that.

I’m sorry if I offended you. That was not my intention. I was just being honest, which I assumed you wanted.

Unlike yourself, I’m not a student. I lead the creative and communication section at the agency where I work. I oversee a staff of copywriters, designers and various other creative professionals. I’ve been in this field for 30-some years.

If you want to freely benefit from that — not only from me, but from others here with similar levels of experience — you’ve come to the right place. If you would rather be praised and coddled for work containing significant problems, perhaps it might have been better to have asked you mom (or mum in Australia) — they can be quite good at that sort of thing.

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I didn’t even get past the odd url to look.

I can take harsh criticism and all, but what you are doing right now is Grammar Policing my work. In fact, I have seen some of your posts and technically, you are being very nitpicking on pointless things. Just because you have doing this field for 30 years, it doesn’t mean you are an expert on every area in the Graphic Design Industry.

I never ask feedback from my mum by the way, I get feedback from actual graphic designers because when I hear someone like you, who probably doesn’t have a whole range of Diplomas of Graphic Designs, I have seen what Americans act like online and they do have large egos, going around and saying that they have done this for 20 years when they don’t have real qualifications at all. But hey, if I want to look for some actual feedback, I will ask professional graphic designers because what you say and everything does not make any sense. You’re just going around, being a jerk towards everyone and probably live in a basement at your mother’s house, which is not cool.

Disclaimer - I’m also a design student :slight_smile:

I’d like to see the logo you’ve used in the big image, up there in the header row - at the moment it’s looking a little plain.

With the menu bar, I feel like there is too much padding around the items (top and bottom) making the words float a little. Perhaps bumping up the text size by a few points and tightening up the spacing will make the menu bar be informative without dominating the page?

I’m not sure if you’re being marked on the copy, but linking up ‘sign up now’ and ‘check out our gallery’ would give some nice calls to action within the text.

On the second page, with the circles, the subheadings are blending a little with the bottom text. To get some nice heirarchy going on there, perhaps increase the size by a few points?

Your course possibly doesn’t cover Accessibility (which is actually my professional expertise), but it’s worth being aware that ‘click here’ is a big no-no - if you’ve not come across accessibility before, when you get a chance it might be worth checking out the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (just Google it).

Good luck!

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I bin resumes immediately if there are grammar or typos in them or the related portfolio website. It shows poor work ethic.
Not sure why you think such things are nitpicky.
Presentation is very important - in all aspects of your work.

B gave you a good amount of his time maybe the school should be billed for it.

Send your college professor on over here and maybe he/she can explain why they are having their students seek free advice online. There are very few places on the internet with people qualified to comment on the mechanics of graphic design. You were lucky someone of B’s skill level answered.
I have 20-plus years in the industry myself but won’t even bother to click that link considering your attitude.
Bonne Chance!

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Your post starts with a statement, and the balance of it disproves the statement.

You’re studying to work in the business of communication. If you think “grammar policing” is pointless nitpicking, you’ve chosen the wrong field. Producing professional-level content requires competent writing, and if your university instructors are letting that slide, they’re doing you a disservice. In the graphic design field, every decision you make and every result you produce will be—to the millimeter— questioned; ideally first by you yourself, but subsequently by art directors, creative directors, editors, clients, clients’ pets, passers-by, bums, and miscreants. You don’t get to choose whether that happens or whether it’s appropriate when it does. It just will, so strap in.

I submit that you presently in fact don’t take criticism well, as evidenced by your retaliatory mis-characterization of “American ego” and demonstrated narrow view of what’s important.