When asked to review a site, typically the first thing I look towards is site design. Is the template setup in a way that’s easy to read. Is the site easy to navigate through. Do the colors blend well together and don’t come off as blinding. Then I begin to poke through the actual content of a site. Typically some will say that the content is more important than the layout. To some degree this is true but 90% of the time if you load a site and it’s close to impossible to read anything then naturally you’re not going to stay there for very long, no matter what the resource.
I was asked to write a review on discountsafetygear.com. They offer everything from Hard Hats to Safety Goggles. The bulk of their website is setup in .html format and as someone who uses PHP exclusively I don’t quite understand the reason behind it but I’m not here to look at how the webmaster coded it, but what the final outcome is.
Visually the site is rather appealing. With the size of the text and the initial format of the page I can tell that the owners took Web 2.0 into consideration. It’s very easy to navigate through the page as well. The information listed on the sidebar is easy to read and easy on the eyes as well. I like their New Product section, I’m a sucker for new and interesting gear. There are a few sections where there’s the black and white construction tape and while I can understand the reason behind it, on the sidebar behind the title text there really isn’t much need for it. It makes it a little it hard to read but that could also just be my monitor. By the looks of it the site is fairly CSS heavy but it’s also designed with tables and that honestly doesn’t make much sense to me. I say switch completely to divs, search engines seem to like that a little better.
Considering Baby is prone to some form of self-damage (walking, bending, whichever) I naturally found myself searching through the First Aid Kits. The Home and Personal kits seemed interesting but for some reason I was drawn to the construction section. This is probably because I grew up in a family full of construction workers and knowing the contents of these kits by heart, I kind of wanted to see what an un-used one looked like – if this makes any sense of course. The kit that interests me the most is naturally going to be the most expensive – but this is my taste. I know in regards to safety that it’s important to have everything you’d ever need, even if it’s things you don’t think you’d need. This, of course, is based on the fact that my mother was assistant chief of EMS and always had a bag filled with things.
All in all it’s a fairly decent site and a great resource for safety gear that I’d recommend to anyone, no matter what you happen to be looking for.