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www.butterfly-gifts.com

Introduction

Butterfly & Nature Gift store is an online store where you can purchase custom made framed butterfly displays and other nature related products such as shirts, insect crafts and games, and sea monkeys.

Form and Function

My rating for this one is a 3.5. I like the products she sells here, which does keep me on the site, however, This site needs some color, and rethinking of its structure.

Online stores, from an information architecture standpoint, are very complex, and require a great deal of planning. When making an online purchase, it is important that the site I am buying from appear professional and trustworthy, and unfortunately this site misses that mark for me.

The layout of the front page is not too bad for me – it gets right to the point, and you know that this is an online store selling butterfly “something” immediately. I would like to see the text to introduce the site moved above the product area, giving an introduction to what can be found here, with links to internal pages. This would do well for SEO as well.

The product boxes on the front are a bit too tight and give it a cluttered feel. They also lack style. The inner product photos however are great. A perfect size, and excellent quality. The product boxes loose this layout completely when going to the internal pages, which I think is a bad idea.

The footer throughout the site remains centered and fixed, which does coincide with the content area of the inner pages, but does match the front page. I feel this area needs some definition, either a separator bar, or a block of color, so as to “enclose” the focal area above it.

There are also a few different font families in use on different pages of the site.

Conclusion

There are a great deal of pages here, and while the links are all available on the inside pages, there are entirely too many of them, making navigation an overwhelming experience.

The main level navigation links introduced on the front page are on the left sidebar, but then change horizontal navigation bar just under the header area. From a user standpoint, this is confusing.

When you use the links within the product box area those lead you into a fluid width design, and all navigation is lost, forcing me to use the back button to navigate anywhere else. Very unusable.

I find the inner pages hard to read, and the content area needs definition. This site would be more usable if they maintained the front page layout through the site, keeping all the links pertinent to the page.

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