What do you think about this website?

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Guys and girls please check this site out and give us your honest opinion, http://www.spectratec.co.za/

[Mojakoki]

It's unique + catchy !! - although I'm not a fan of black, perhaps blue would be more inviting??

1 or 2 bugs to sort out - the text on the article on XP - disappears behind the images on the RHS
and it's cust'o'mer.

But well done to the developer / designer, so far.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

It's unique + catchy !! - although I'm not a fan of black, perhaps blue would be more inviting??

1 or 2 bugs to sort out - the text on the article on XP - disappears behind the images on the RHS
and it's cust'o'mer.

But well done to the developer / designer, so far.

It's a site my brother and I am developing, whats your screen resolution?

[ians]

There is nothing worse than going onto a website and there is no telephone number, other than that it looks good.

The colour is not an issue for me I like the fact that you can see the writing clearly, it is bold enough for us old ballies to see.

[adrianh]

I personally don't like all the movement and stuff changing all the time on the home screen.

Another thing: Your use of English language and punctuation is terrible. You must have somebody proof read the stuff that you write.

Here is an example:

On the second day of Samsung’s Analyst Day they announced how they plan on how to stay on top of their companion. Their announce for bended and foldable displays was one thing but when it came to how they will be staying on top it got really interesting, they said they were planning on putting 64-bit processors in their future smartphones and not just that but will be developing its own “optimized” 64-bit design so its riding the wave that Apple started with its iPhone 5s. Samsung also announced that it plans to produce bended screens in 2014 and if they can overcome some technical barriers, foldable displays starting 2015.

One of Samsung’s big strengths are their screens and they said that it wants to push the screen and release smartphones with a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution and pixel density of 560ppi, now to put it into perspective the Nexus 5 that was lunched last week already has 445ppi. But there’s more because they will continue to push and they want to put out 4K resolution screens by 2015.

These are some big plans for a company that does have allot of muscle behind it but if they want to continue to be competitive they will have to have and reach these types of goals.

Okay so a little while ago cooler master announced it will be releasing a new AL-series from CM storm which will include a new REAPER mouse, MECH keyboard and PULSE-R headsets. So we thought we would find out if they really are as good as they look. You can follow the links below to go to there full articles and take a look for yourself.

Im reading this page: GameXtend adds more playing time to your smartphone

and it says "Your reading.."

I read the splurb on that page and it is also not very good.

"With the release of the PlayStation 4 in a couple of days on the 5th of November" - Looking at today's date you need to be very careful when writing stuff connected to specific dates. We all forget to update stuff and those three words immediately show that the website isn't updated regularly.


With the arrival of the Ps4 and Xbox One so close we were discussing the future of consoles thing like "will there be another console after thing generation?" Well in our opinion this is the last one of its kind, I know what some of you may be thinking that there will always be consoles, but let’s take a look at the some facts, ...why is this a comma


If I hear next gen console it’s an automatic 60 FPs on any new game release but yet some game at launch will only be running at 30 FPs and many of you say well I’m fine with 30 FPs there is nothing wrong with it, well if you have spent some time playing on a PC that can play games at 60 FPs you know it must be the standard, -break the sentence up

Where not saying that the living room experience with a controller will go away but the consoles themselves will be gone, if we have a look at the new nvidia shield using your pc’s hardware for streaming your live gameplay to your TV you will have 60 FPs at 720p (1080p coming soon nvidia said) and you can use your controller when it’s in “console mode” you will have the ability to play your games at frame rates higher than any console can dream of,
- break the sentence up


So we come up with the conclusion that there will not be another console generation like this because technologies like the nvidia shield streaming will take over the console market.

You must understand that one should not write as one speaks. People need concise facts, not long drawn out stories. You must also be careful of looooong sentences with lots of commas.

I just read a couple of the write-ups on the site and notes some issues off the top of my head. I am sure that you will find my comments harsh but I call it as I see it. There is nothing more off-putting than having to sift through long stories full of bad grammar when one is simply looking for specs.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

I personally don't like all the movement and stuff changing all the time on the home screen.

Another thing: Your use of English language and punctuation is terrible. You must have somebody proof read the stuff that you write.

Here is an example:

On the second day of Samsung’s Analyst Day they announced how they plan on how to stay on top of their companion. Their announce for bended and foldable displays was one thing but when it came to how they will be staying on top it got really interesting, they said they were planning on putting 64-bit processors in their future smartphones and not just that but will be developing its own “optimized” 64-bit design so its riding the wave that Apple started with its iPhone 5s. Samsung also announced that it plans to produce bended screens in 2014 and if they can overcome some technical barriers, foldable displays starting 2015.

One of Samsung’s big strengths are their screens and they said that it wants to push the screen and release smartphones with a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution and pixel density of 560ppi, now to put it into perspective the Nexus 5 that was lunched last week already has 445ppi. But there’s more because they will continue to push and they want to put out 4K resolution screens by 2015.

These are some big plans for a company that does have allot of muscle behind it but if they want to continue to be competitive they will have to have and reach these types of goals.

Okay so a little while ago cooler master announced it will be releasing a new AL-series from CM storm which will include a new REAPER mouse, MECH keyboard and PULSE-R headsets. So we thought we would find out if they really are as good as they look. You can follow the links below to go to there full articles and take a look for yourself.

Im reading this page: GameXtend adds more playing time to your smartphone

and it says "Your reading.."

I read the splurb on that page and it is also not very good.

"With the release of the PlayStation 4 in a couple of days on the 5th of November" - Looking at today's date you need to be very careful when writing stuff connected to specific dates. We all forget to update stuff and those three words immediately show that the website isn't updated regularly.


With the arrival of the Ps4 and Xbox One so close we were discussing the future of consoles thing like "will there be another console after thing generation?" Well in our opinion this is the last one of its kind, I know what some of you may be thinking that there will always be consoles, but let’s take a look at the some facts, ...why is this a comma


If I hear next gen console it’s an automatic 60 FPs on any new game release but yet some game at launch will only be running at 30 FPs and many of you say well I’m fine with 30 FPs there is nothing wrong with it, well if you have spent some time playing on a PC that can play games at 60 FPs you know it must be the standard, -break the sentence up

Where not saying that the living room experience with a controller will go away but the consoles themselves will be gone, if we have a look at the new nvidia shield using your pc’s hardware for streaming your live gameplay to your TV you will have 60 FPs at 720p (1080p coming soon nvidia said) and you can use your controller when it’s in “console mode” you will have the ability to play your games at frame rates higher than any console can dream of,
- break the sentence up


So we come up with the conclusion that there will not be another console generation like this because technologies like the nvidia shield streaming will take over the console market.

You must understand that one should not write as one speaks. People need concise facts, not long drawn out stories. You must also be careful of looooong sentences with lots of commas.

I just read a couple of the write-ups on the site and notes some issues off the top of my head. I am sure that you will find my comments harsh but I call it as I see it. There is nothing more off-putting than having to sift through long stories full of bad grammar when one is simply looking for specs.

Thanks for the advise adrianh, we will take a look into that and not everybody likes the style but not everybody likes angelina jolie,hahaha thanks for the input and all the hard work,hehehehe and whats wrong with writing like one speaks? if it was all facts how much fun would it be to read

[adrianh]

hmmm...

Aye well, horses for courses as they say!

[league_of_ordinary_men]

hmmm...

Aye well, horses for courses as they say!

Don't worry we aim to please and thank you again for your opinion,I mean how can we improve if we don't get feed back if you see anything else please do let us know. Oh and we have this cool feature if you register with us you get a dedicated sales representative.

[Dave A]

Quite a long wait for anything to appear on the first page load of a first visit, and I'm on a pretty high speed connection right now

I know it can be tricky to resolve (I have a similar problem with TFSA which I still haven't managed to beat back to where I'd like to see it), but with an online shopping site page load time is pretty important.

If you can get the header area to display quickly at the very least, it would already be a big improvement.

[vieome]

Home page should have something about the company, with a few featured products. Departments ... Electronics should be PC components . me thinks. Also think you should lose the black. I also think e.g I looked for desktop hard drives, and the page loaded about 15, it is just too much choice and perhaps the reason some pages load so slow.

[Mark Atkinson]

Sjoe. Where to start...

Quite a long wait for anything to appear on the first page load of a first visit, and I'm on a pretty high speed connection right now

Half the problem is that the site is on a US server and a slow one at that. If you're serving local clientèle I highly recommend running your website be hosted on a local server. Other than that the site, being a CMS site (Joomla), is reasonably well optimised from my brief overview.

As for the actual appeal of the site - I'm not the biggest fan. I sort of like the idea behind the header but the final product definitely feels very unpolished. Things are cut off where they shouldn't be, there are overlaps where elements should be in line and overall it just comes across as disjointed.

As Adrianh pointed out, the grammar and spelling is not great and for a Grammar Nazi like me that comes across as extremely unprofessional. Not everyone is Charles Dickens, but if you can't write well or English is not your first language, you should definitely hire a copywriter to do it for you.

The menu feels cluttered and keeps bugging out when I use it in Chrome. It's very easy for your mouse to slide off the edge and the menu disappears. This can become pretty frustrating as you have several nested categories coming out of a single main menu item. I'd look to serve your top level categories as fixed items on your main menu bar if at all possible. The images on the menu categories is kind of a decent idea, but again it feels unrefined. It looks almost like they were just stuck on as an afterthought, rather than the menu designed with the images in mind.

The font you use on your logo and certain headings (Newswire) is very difficult to read and I think your brand will suffer in the long run because of it. Just because it's a cool looking font doesn't mean it's fit for a purpose where readability is key.

If I had to guess, I'd say this site was built using a lower cost template (around $20, or possibly even free) as opposed to being a premium template which would cost $50-100. I'm sorry, but it just feels scrappy.

Other small issues I have:

- There are little to no trust factors on the site. Mastercard and Visa logos don't in the slightest convince me to buy from you when I can't see any phone numbers, addresses, testimonials, listings on price comparison engines like Pricecheck, etc. I'd be extremely wary of buying from your site and would probably pay a premium to a more trustworthy site for peace of mind.

- You don't seem to use an SSL certificate to secure your site/checkout process. (Another trust factor)


I'm sorry for what may seem like harsh feedback, but succeeding with e-commerce is not easy. There are hundreds of factors which contribute to an online store's success and you need to be doing a vast majority of those things well before you'll see your site do well.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Quite a long wait for anything to appear on the first page load of a first visit, and I'm on a pretty high speed connection right now

I know it can be tricky to resolve (I have a similar problem with TFSA which I still haven't managed to beat back to where I'd like to see it), but with an online shopping site page load time is pretty important.

If you can get the header area to display quickly at the very least, it would already be a big improvement.

Hi Dave, we tested our site from a local server and its 2 seconds faster then yuppiechef.com and 2 seconds faster the kalahari.net and we are still working on improving the speed. We get what you are saying with the header area, if the customer can see something happening while it happens they feel its not that slow, we are working on certain elements appearing faster. We just lunched the site so now comes all the improvements.Thank you for the comment please if there's anything else let us know.

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Home page should have something about the company, with a few featured products. Departments ... Electronics should be PC components . me thinks. Also think you should lose the black. I also think e.g I looked for desktop hard drives, and the page loaded about 15, it is just too much choice and perhaps the reason some pages load so slow.

Hi vieome, thanks for the tip on "something about the company" we are actually working on that we like the idea of changing the Electronics to PC components we are going to change it. I know some people don't like the black but we like it due to it's uniqueness, I mean how many black sites do you see. 15 products may seam like to much but some customers finds it too frustrating to have to go trough more pages because there's not enough products on a page so we have to strike the balance just right. Keep the comments coming it helps us improve the site

[league_of_ordinary_men]

Sjoe. Where to start...



Half the problem is that the site is on a US server and a slow one at that. If you're serving local clientèle I highly recommend running your website be hosted on a local server. Other than that the site, being a CMS site (Joomla), is reasonably well optimised from my brief overview.

As for the actual appeal of the site - I'm not the biggest fan. I sort of like the idea behind the header but the final product definitely feels very unpolished. Things are cut off where they shouldn't be, there are overlaps where elements should be in line and overall it just comes across as disjointed.

As Adrianh pointed out, the grammar and spelling is not great and for a Grammar Nazi like me that comes across as extremely unprofessional. Not everyone is Charles Dickens, but if you can't write well or English is not your first language, you should definitely hire a copywriter to do it for you.

The menu feels cluttered and keeps bugging out when I use it in Chrome. It's very easy for your mouse to slide off the edge and the menu disappears. This can become pretty frustrating as you have several nested categories coming out of a single main menu item. I'd look to serve your top level categories as fixed items on your main menu bar if at all possible. The images on the menu categories is kind of a decent idea, but again it feels unrefined. It looks almost like they were just stuck on as an afterthought, rather than the menu designed with the images in mind.

The font you use on your logo and certain headings (Newswire) is very difficult to read and I think your brand will suffer in the long run because of it. Just because it's a cool looking font doesn't mean it's fit for a purpose where readability is key.

If I had to guess, I'd say this site was built using a lower cost template (around $20, or possibly even free) as opposed to being a premium template which would cost $50-100. I'm sorry, but it just feels scrappy.

Other small issues I have:

- There are little to no trust factors on the site. Mastercard and Visa logos don't in the slightest convince me to buy from you when I can't see any phone numbers, addresses, testimonials, listings on price comparison engines like Pricecheck, etc. I'd be extremely wary of buying from your site and would probably pay a premium to a more trustworthy site for peace of mind.

- You don't seem to use an SSL certificate to secure your site/checkout process. (Another trust factor)


I'm sorry for what may seem like harsh feedback, but succeeding with e-commerce is not easy. There are hundreds of factors which contribute to an online store's success and you need to be doing a vast majority of those things well before you'll see your site do well.

Hi Mark, Sjoe. Where to start.. hahhahaha

The server problem - We are hosting with hostgator and they are experiencing some trouble with there servers due to server trouble over the last couple of months. We host with them because no body in South Africa can offer what we need for the price, we have been with Godaddy before and a few South African hosts as well and our experiences with them hasn't been very good and performance was either the same or worse and it cost more, to be able to get the same package we have now we would pay an arm and a leg locally.

As for the actual appeal of the site - Some like it some don't and we respect everyone's opinions. Do you mind elaborating more on which parts feel unpolished, cut off, overlaping and disjointed so we can have a look at them, please keep in mind we do have our own unique style, I mean if we wanted to look like takeallot or kalahari we would go and buy the template and we don't like the same old feel of those sites. Don't get us wrong there good but in our opinion it's been done to many times.

Grammar - we are working on our grammar and thank you for pointing it out to us.

Menus - We actually talked about the menu drop out functionality and we are planing on making it easier to use. We are looking into the menu and have a few ideas. Why do you say the images in the menu looks like an afterthought?

We have seen a lot of temples cheap and expensive and so good and some bad, you of all people should know you use what you got and you make the best of it. You know how much hard work goes into making a good website, to some it might be good to some it might be crappy. If your hung up on the cost of the template rather then the website as a whole and what has been done to get it that way then your judging the site based on the amount of money put into.

Trust factor - the reason we don't have any phone numbers on the site is because we can't handle all the call's as of yet, thus you will be on hold the whole time and that's bad customer service. We will be adding a phone number in the future once we have the infrastructure. What the address in concerned we are busy moving to a different location. We are working on getting on price comparison engines but we do require some time. The payment gateway we are getting ready to use has it's own SSL but we were thinking of activating our SSL in the shopping cart we just need our host to sort out there server trouble or it might slow us down even more.

Thank you for all the advise and feedback, all this helps us improve and you need to keep in mind that we are in a start up phase so like any site there are bugs to sort out but with all our customers feedback and yours we will get there to bring you the customer the shopping experience you want. Our site might not be everyone's taste our style but nobody can please everybody.Please keep the comments and suggestions coming, it helps us improve and you get to see us become better.

[Dave A]

The server problem - We are hosting with hostgator and they are experiencing some trouble with there servers due to server trouble over the last couple of months.

Years more like it. Hostgator is an overseller, one of the biggest. And the moment you start needing a bit of processing power or get a bit of traffic you're in deep trouble due to their (unadvertised, but very real) concurrent connections limit.

We host with them because no body in South Africa can offer what we need for the price

You're not getting what you need from Hostgator already (and based on others and my experience with them, with what you are trying to do you probably never will )

Look for a thread on hosting in the TFSA Locals forum for a recommendation (or more).