New Website......

I didnt see the old one.

The site looks good. Nice colors, clean, uncluttered, easy to navigate. I am looking at it on IE 6 and everything resized roperly save for the left menu. If I continue to squash the window horizontally the menu frame get too thin to display its options...you might have it remain a fixed pixel width and make ony the content frame resize. This could behave differently depending on wich browser you use. But I like that the site is easy to get around and informative with good photos that fit the overall design. One of the nicer knife company sites I have seen :)

I think I may have to get me one o' them CUDA MAXX 5.5's too....Muahahahahahahahahahhahhahahahahha...haha.....ha........*cough* :p
 
Great site.
Much easier to navigate around, and I love the sample picturse for each catagory.
 
Great pics, easy to navigate, nice formatting. However, it may be my browser but the lettering in the descriptions is so small that it's very difficult to read.
 
Will,

It's fast, to the point and no useless "gimmicks"! My only negative thought is that on every page, about 25% of the space on the right is unused, blank, nothing there. You could make use of that space and expand many of your pictures. My feeling is that with knife websites, the most important features are clear LARGE pictures. If I don't update my site regularly with new ones my customers give me HELL :)

EDIT: one more thought!! I'm not sure why web designers do it but most people are right handed. Having the left side navigation bars just seems odd to me. Having to run the cursor across the screen all the time just makes the site more dificult to navigate.

Just my 2Cents :) Other than that it works very well.

Neil
 
It's been a while since I surfed your site. . .so, I'm used to the old looks.

Superb face-lift ! :D
 
Very cool site (like all CUDAs), just my 2 cents for improvement

1. I HATE frames (I can't bookmark the page I want... I always end up 'marking the mother frame instead the one with the data I want)

2. You should add a nice set of META tags to improve visibility on web searchers/robots.

3. You could put the links to the knive's pages on the images too, not just the text, since that would easy the click.


NsB
 
Big improvement over the last time I visited the old site. Much easier to get around. On my screen I only have about a 1/3" of unused space on the right. I love the use of thumbnails.

Edited to put in a couple of words I left out.
 
very nice!

That new 5.5 is awesome, gotta get me one of those

1 question? how did you get away with not putting some kind of coating on the D2 blade? I know its nearly stainless working metal, what is your rusting preventitive? Thanks.
 
Originally posted by Tracer-san
1. I HATE frames (I can't bookmark the page I want... I always end up 'marking the mother frame instead the one with the data I want)
Click to expand...
Frames have some advantages.
For example, the webmaster don't have to write over and over again to provide the same navigation bar. Sure you could cut and paste, but sometimes you make mistakes and you'd have to find them. There are solutions like Server Side Includes, which is some kind of strange code that tells the server to automatically insert a bunch of code in the HTML file, reducing the likelihood of mistakes. Secondly, the computer wouldn't have to download the same code for the navigation bars and stuff. However, most of that advantage is solved when computer has a decent amount of cache to prevent redundant downloading.
I personally don't mind frames much, and Will, nice facelift for the site. The site needed it and frankly I like to see the BK 7 and 9 on the site.
 
If your web master can post flash movies, I can make a flash movie showing the knives open and close. Just send an open/closed photo of a knife @ swat@hotswat.com
 
Originally posted by calyth
Frames have some advantages.
Click to expand...

Sure they do, but those are less than the disadvantages they have.

The copy/paste thing can be easily solved using a mother template and work from there for all pages, and the size of the code for navigation, if you do your job well (and in this case they did) would not be significant compared to the rest of the page.
Even if you're a total newbie on this and use a navigational squeeme all based on images, most of actual computers would not have a single problem caching that, so you'd just have to load the code "calling" those images, wich would be again, irrelevant to teh size of the page.

I'm not trying to be a smart ass in here, but since I know about this, I think I can put my grain of sand to the forums this way, since you guys already forgot what I still don't know about knives :eek:

Again, frames are an easy way to work, but for a company website is better to stay away from them.


Will, don't feel bad about your site for what I say about it, I'm just mentioning a couple ways to improve it (both of them can be EASILY implemented), not dissing it -at all. It's a VERY nice ans usable site nonetheless.

Regards!


NsB
 
Tracer-san: if you didn't notice, I've also provided the counter-arguments against my advantage of Frames things.
Like server side includes, where the redundant code would be dealt with by the server, and yes I did mention that on a modern computer, caching would likely solve the redownload problem.
I use to be a small time gamesite webmaster, and I use to employ tricks like preloding big pictures and stuff. It wasn't fun because there's no easy solution for redundant code, and until the very end, there's no CGI for me to mess with, so I end up just hacking Javascript solutions by myself.
Still I don't really mind frames much, but yeah, they've been disappearing lately.
And no flash please!!! I beg you!!! Although I have a cable modem, I still hate flash. It will totally wreck the bandwidth for people who are still on modems. Don't do it.
 
Originally posted by calyth
Tracer-san: if you didn't notice, I've also provided the counter-arguments against my advantage of Frames things.
Click to expand...
I did notice that, so? You kinda lost me here. :eek:

Bottom line is that frame-based websites are less usable and "findable" than non frames-based ones. That's all, it's up to you -or whomever build a site- to make it as s/he wants.

I made a lot of frames sites because its so much easier and the budget wasn't cool for another thing, and that doesn't mean they're bad sites, just that they can be improved.


I also hate 99% of Flash uses on the web nowadays :(

Take care ;)

NsB
 
Guys,

I appreciate your comments on the new Camillus site. Thank you for the tour and I really appreciate your feedback. You'll be seeing a lot of growth on this one over time.

I guess a couple of points in reading your comments ...
Bottom line is that frame-based websites are less usable and "findable" than non frames-based ones. That's all, it's up to you -or whomever build a site- to make it as s/he wants.
Click to expand...

No offense, but I'm wondering what you mean, or how you're arriving at the position that frame based sites are "less usable"? In our business, the only acid test that we would even consider is in the "daily user stats". Do you have any data to back up your position?

Not trying to be an A$$ or anything, but I can produce more than 1 million visitors a month in traffic data to back our choice of navigational options. I can tell you, without question, that a left-hand frame based navigation system is the most effective option in terms of "page depth, time on page, time on site and partial content retrieval" that you can design. We've done them all, and still do. In fact, it almost doubles the numbers of a standard "deck of cards" layout, whether running SSI or template driven aspects. In our case, design difficulty or budget was not an issue at all. We build what the numbers tell us will work best, and we can produce the numbers.

Actually, the Camillus site runs in frames, but also uses SSI, PHP and Perl. The Perl running both the internal search engine and also the cloaking software for keeping the critical meta content out of public view, which, in this case, is important considering the nature of the client's business market. And leads me to ...

As far as a frame based site being something that someone personally doesn't care for, this is a risk you run on any given visitor. But, professionally, you design for the numbers. The argument against framed sites being less index-able (or as you mentioned ... less findable?), I've read that for years on all the web master training type sites. I suppose the only argument I can make that would make any case against this position is that we currently have 1-10 rankings under 90% of the major key words in the knife industry. Actually, I think this is more an argument against the deep linked pages being opened outside the frameset from a targeted url listing. The point being, yes ... this is the common issue in the frameset design for most amateur web designers. In our case, we employ coding that eliminates the issue. Here's a deep linked example:
http://camillusknives.com/cuda/cuda_tal220.shtml
Voila ... opens inside the nav set! All the pages on this site perform in this way.

Anything beyond the numbers, style and personal preference aspects for instance, I can't defend. But, the aspects being discussed above, frameset index-ability ... usability ... and such, the numbers don't lie ... and we have the numbers.

I'm not all that sure that professionally using SSI and/or templates in the design to make your work simple is really a good position to follow. I would argue that these elements should be used if you need to design for long term ease of updating, or global content change across a deep site. The Camillus site is marginally deep, but they are a very dynamic and large company, so the reason we employed SSI was to simplify the content page navigation during global product line updates, which will be often.

The props go to Will, Bill, Phil and of course, Jim. These guys are the one's that did the hard work for Camillus ... all we do at atlantavirtual.com is type ... and hype :) !

Again, thanks for the feedback. Plus or minus, it's all good here.

Alex
 
Personally I find frames to be a subpar solution to the question of web design. If you are already using PHP, SSI, or any sort of dynamic page building, you might as well use side navigation other than framesets if for nothing else than to simplify your coding somewhat. No need to use "target=", no need for some of the other coding esoterics, no need for the javascript redirects, etc.

For example, I turned off javascript and went to
http://camillusknives.com/cuda/cuda_tal220.shtml
- I got the bare frame page, no side nav, no other navigation, just a bare bones page. By using SSI for your navigation (or some other template driven design) this page would not appear as an orphan. (Granted, those without Javascript are something of a minority, but again, it's all about personal preference. I can't believe the number of people who still use WebTV and Lynx, but that's another story.)

Personally, frames aside, I find this website to be a refreshing update and extremely well done. Of course, since AV did it, I expected nothing less from Alex and his crew. Nice to see high quality images as well - it makes things much easier for customers.

Kevin
 
Kevin,

$1000 dollars says you "can not" be orphaned on that page. There's a full nav set on every page within this site ... for exactly this reason.

Even if you come in without java to that link, without prior knowledge of the original layout, you would not be orphaned in that page or anywhere in the site, as I said. Try it again and look at it from the standpoint of a standard deck layout site, and you'll see ... it works both ways with redundant nav, as well. You can find every other product on the site from there ... same number of clicks, in fact.

The only reason that we use frameset navigation like we do is simple. I can produce 2x the page penetration per visitor than an standard layout. Left hand, top or bottom hand hard links will always scroll out of the window on a flat page system, no matter what you do ... unless you're crazy enough to use a slide layer. In fact, when you loose the navigation above the content and force the user to work for it by scrolling, you "will" shorten visits. That's not speculation ...

Stuff like browser resolution, browser version, default settings and connection properties are straight forward. Almost like the huckster at the circus, you can point to 100 random users on bladeforums.com, at this very moment, and I can tell you within +/- 3% of certainty where their properties configure right now.

OK ... here's a lesson for any aspiring designer.
Camillus has literally 100's of knives in their 4 product lines (Camillus - Western - Cuda - BK&T). Now, let's say that you wanted to go find a say ... "BK&T TacTool".
Go here: http://www.camillusknives.com and count the number of clicks it takes you to find it and how much time it takes to do it.

Then from there ... find a CUDA MAXX 5.5 and look at it.

Now ... go to another website that carries them. Something with a couple of hundred other products, and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. In my business, asthetics are really nothing more than candy. It's the product that counts ... if you can find the content you're need, we're toast. Most designers never get it. They're too busy trying to look creative. In the process, they create themselves out of a functional site, costing their clients in visitor convenience, therefore business.

Like I said, it's all in the numbers!

I wish it was different. In business web design, Picasso would be broke!

Alex
 
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