This is the second post of a two parter about how a heuristic analysis can help your site. The first part can be found here, The Usability of Wigs. The site being used as example today is CB’s Limited and their Prom Dresses page.

Prom Dresses Look Great

The prom dresses look great, but what about the site? A quick analysis of a ecommerce site, and I would say pass. It has a normal layout, and many of the essential items required for an ecommerce site are found. Those items are like: a shopping cart, phone numbers, policies, shipping information, and many other trust factors that say this is safe place to buy a product online.

What’s killing the site though? It’s font consistencies. Too often webmasters work on different parts of a site, or through copying and pasting code end up with sites that do not have a consistent format. See the example below. When considering what font to use, know that you need to be consistent in font type, color, size, and extra emphasis for all things through out the site.

If you look at their Prom Dresses page you will see most of it is done with Verdana, but you will also find Lucida, Sans-Serif, and Arial. Four font types, in most cases, is too much. Font type should always be aggressively limited, and if possible, limited to just one. This is an easy way to make a site look consistent, and more professional.

When font type is under control, control of sizes needs to be addressed. Like picking colors for a site try to limit different sizes to about three or four. An example is to have all your paragraphs or heading titles one size, all your content another, and then address special items with strong or small sizes. You can even have different sizes for H1, H2, H3 tags and so on, as just as long as it is consistent throughout.

Easy way to improve the sales of this site? Fix the fonts.

dresses, prom, usability