Fresh Eyes needed - DESIGN CRITIQUE

[SirenaRose]

My first thought with the car listings is that if you are a visual person, not necessarily reading...your eyes stay in the same place. Personally, I'm a fan of having the pictures zigzag - one be on the left side, the other be on the right side, of the text. Since my eyes stay in the same place, I only really scan through for the picture, which might not directly reflect what I want to buy, as the pictures look like they may be the stock pictures. I know I'm not a huge successful person and I haven't been here long, but that was just my original impression of the lists of cars.

Also, the banner looks good -- Once it loads, and it takes a lot longer than I'd really have the patience to load if I was cruising 4 or 5 other sites for what I want.

The next thing that might not be doing him one bit of a favor is that if you click on the category of cars that you're looking for, and scroll down to whatever type of car you want...For example, a Ford Mustang -- it takes you to the ford motor company's website in the same window. Like someone pointed out to me, with my links to affiliates on my site, it should open in a different window, while keeping mine there -- or maybe atleast put things in an iframe or something, so that the customer has the contact information for your friend's company while they're perusing through the Ford website looking at the styles and options that they might have.

I'd also think about having a way of sorting what is currently in stock and looking specifically at that -- Some people would rather impulse buy than wait the whatever length of time to get one imported in custom, and want to know, before they make the trek to the actual showroom, what they might be able to expect. I would assume that the company actually has a few vehicles in stock at any given time, as they have a "What's coming" and "used vehicles" etc section. If I'm specifically looking for a mustang, I don't want to have to scroll through a list of hummers, escalades and trucks to find my sports car. I want it on demand right then and there....I just now see the link to Magicmotorcars.com, where they have the lists, but again, that's taking you off site, and you don't know what to expect there, as you're already on a magicmotorcars site...

When on the "contact" page, I personally am a "form" type person. I don't like the mailto: code. That means I have to wait for my email program to load, I fret over "well, am I really contacting the right department?" and never know what to say, or what information the department needs. Perhaps it's just me...Or maybe it could come from having gone for so long using webmail programs and not even setting up the mail program on my computer (I even know many many people who have the programs uninstalled/unavailable, so it just gives them an error message!). I'm lazy. I don't want to have to go through the whole loop of putting the stress on me to know what information I need to give and to whom.

Erm, I think that about covers my initial thoughts on the site. Hope this helps!