This is not to promote my website. I really need some opinions and what better place to come than here. I’ve been working on this garage sale website for a couple of weeks. Please go to Garage Sale Zone and tell me what you think. Look at as many pages as you like and the source codes and tell me what needs to be changed or added. Thanks in advance.
Just glanced at your page, and only one thing jumped out at me. I believe “clothes” is misspelled as “cloths” multiple times.
I like the modular green and white layout.
Looks good 
I would suggest providing a contact/suggestions form as well as an email link for those people who are not quite interested enough to actually mail their ideas or questions.
I would change the menu suggestion “Sell your items” to “Sell your items online”.
Consider, at this start-up phase, adding garage-sales from the local papers of the major cities in each state. It looks a little bare in the listings.
What does “this is a sample garage sale” mean? If it means “this is not actually a garage sale” then perhaps move them to separate “examples” menu-item, them being in the database is confusing.
Consider getting a proper logo, this can then be put on your “print” section, which is a really good idea. The print section is a fantastic idea, it works out as free advertising for you. For this reason you should make it a little more eye-catching, and have a number of different “themes”. Your URL should be clearly visible.
If you want to be able to have greater controll of what your customers are offering, and how they are enterting their offers, consider letting them tick boxes for what they are selling at the garage sale instead of writing in a text box.
Not bad at all! I personally can’t stand noisy, frilly sites that offer more for the eye than services. Yours seems simple to navigate, is nicely laid out, and its purpose is clear. Good work, I’d use it.
From a graphical point of view: you might want to try to “square up” the different boxes so there’s a bit more symmetry; a properly formatted table should make that work. The placement of the boxes currently looks haphazard; also, the spacing also gets weird if the browser window changes sizes, particularly on a large screen (I’m viewing it on a 21" monitor). Also enlarge/bold up the headers on the different panels; they should be emphasized for clearer, quicker identification of what each box contains. And make sure the fonts remain consistent; you’ve got the default font popping up in a place or two where you have a sans serif throughout the rest of the page(s).
Otherwise, I agree with the comment above: a nice “clean” layout.
Looks pretty good to me and it seems like a really good idea. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of something like this before.
I don’t like the stark green on white. I think a “greyer” shade of green would be better, or the use of other shades/blends to lessen the contrast between the two colours.
I’ll probably get some flack for this but I think there’s not enough eye candy. When I loaded it, I saw loads of blue text; this was a lot to read and somewhat overwhelimg. Really “professional” pages tend to use lots of small graphics so a viewer can quickly “visualize” how the page operates. And I agree Malchats suggestion of getting a proper logo.
The counter seems out of place. Perhaps a different style? At least move it to the very bottom.
I like it otherwise. At least there’s no flashing gifs.
It looks like you’ve already made some of the changes suggested.
I like the color scheme and the page does look clean. The home page looks good with the picture of the “featured sellers”, but the other pages could use some kind of graphic(s), I think. Maybe working a logo (as others suggested, I think you need one) into the top in the green space or something along those lines. Nothing too blaring and not lots of stuff. That would take away from the clean look, but just a little something.
Good concept. Good luck with it!
I have to agree that the white background is just a touch to glaring or bright. I also don’t like the font in the upper left corner “Garage Sale Zone”. I find it a bit hard to read clearly and easily. Good idea …Hope it works…How do I show up early?
For the record, I made no mention of the logo; I was more concerned with the layout in general. But yes, I think the type on the banner could be different for clearer reading.
I’ve taken many of your suggestions and have been implementing changes as I go. I just changed the logo at the top of the page. Take a look at it and let me know if it looks better and more legible.
I like it. The only suggestion I have is to implement some of the input boxes on the submission forms as dropdown listboxes when there are a limited number of input options, such as state and times. This way the user has to type less, and is also forced to enter valid data. If you’re unsure how to do this, feel free to drop me an email.
Glad you like it Q.E.D. I liked your suggestion. In the lisings that I have received so far I was getting a lot of various types of input from my form fields. It took a little work but I set up drop down boxes for all my times and states. That should help keep things a little more uniform when I receive data. Great idea!
I might decide to do the check boxes for whatever items people are selling later on but for right now I want to see how it works with just keeping it open so that people can list practically anything. I’ll see how it works.
Now, who knows of some good ways to market this thing?
Hmm, attractive layout, actually useful, works, loads fast…I like it.
Nice. You can do the same with dates too. Just make separate dropdowns for day, date and year. And make year equal to this year or next year. Anything outside of that is silly.
Another good suggestion Q.E.D. It works better with all the new drop downs and it also looks more professional.
Thanks.
Not too sure if this may cause your problems long term, but your HTML is out of the ‘normal’ order.
On the http://www.garagesalezone.com/searchbystate.asp page, you start with a <html> tag for some tables followed by a <body> tag.
You then have another <html> tag and on the next line you have a <head> tag.
You then have a </head> followed by a <body> tag.
At the end you dont’t have enough closing tags </body> and </html> and </html> but as you’ve opened two <body> tags, you need two </body> tags.
I can’t see why you have multiple <html></html> sets and two <body> but only one </body> tags. This (I’m sure) will cause some browser to choke sooner or later.
On your images, some of them have no height or width attributes which means that the browser needs to do more work to render the page. You may want to add these attributes to get the page to render faster.
You also have unmatched FONT tags. Some multiple opens without closures and there are some closures without openings.
You also have a </form> without an apparent form on the page.
You also have some unmatched <td> tags.
You have a <align=“justify”> which seems an orphan and another orphan here <align=“center”>.
Unless I’m mistaken <li style=“font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 2px”> won’t render as you expect in NS browsers. I don’t think they can handle a style on a <li> tag, but I could be wrong.
You may to consider using a family of fonts rather than just arial, such as arial, verdana, helvetica to try and get a similar font on most machines. Any that don’t have arial will probably end up in Times and given your site is ‘sans serif’ a serif font may detract from the look.
Overall your site renders quite nicely on IE6, but I couldn’t say whether it will look as it’s supposed to on other browsers.
You should consider validating your code at:
http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/
It may save you long term pain if you can clean up some of the code.
Regards.
You should strongly consider moving your styles into a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). The way you have it set up, you will have a nightmare of a time if you decide to change a color, a font, etc.
More importantly, the font tag is deprecated and may cease to work in future browsers, so that should be a big incentive to go to CSS over embedded styles.
Your tables display all funny in Mozilla/NS7. Just so you know.