Aircraft For Sale
Introduction
AFORS, The Aircraft For Sale website provides aviation enthusiasts classified advertising on the internet. Though the service that the author provide is interesting and unique, the website itself needs a big re-structuring.
Form and Function
The author has done a good job in describing what the website is about in the index page. The website looked normal to me at first but there were serious problems when I started clicking on the links.
The menu items on the left need to stand out more. The mouse-over effects could have been better. I would suggest a stronger mouse-over contrast with reversal of white and blue colors. Some menu items are too long. For example “Create and Maintain Ads(log on)”. The few links further down the menu actually point to other websites and I would suggest the author to group it under “other links”. In addition to the four drop down boxes for searching aircrafts, the author might also want to create special categories based on the searches. For example, “Featured Aircrafts” and so on. The menu is important because it tells the user the amount of information the website provides. Too few menu items might make the site looks boring but too many menu items might confuse the user.
Afors.com is designed using frames with many links actually pointing to cfors.co.uk (probably another site of the author). The outgoing urls are very long and not search engine friendly. An example of the url is:
cfors.co.uk/afors/index.php?page=view&adid=3170& si=43f9bfe931d75& PHPSESSID=fb155b8434d005239ca3279aaeb8b470& PHPSESSID=fb155..
There are obvious problems with the php coding and the author might want to fix that asap. Instead of designing the website using frames and grabbing data from cfors.co.uk, I would suggest the author to just focus on one site and redirect traffic from the other site to the main site.
The author might also want to look into the layout of ads in his website. The banners have to be consistent and I would suggest the border of the banners to be 0. The adsense actually blocks some of the text in some pages (See the right illustration). Placing ads in the wrong positions or having ads that obstruct the content can kill a site easily.
Conclusion
I have to say that afors.com needs a big revamp and would suggest the author to get rid of using frames in his website. To make the website more user-friendly, the author needs to work alot harder in the menu design and ads placement. The author is obviously a programmer. He might want to work with a designer to spice up the colors and design of the website.
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