Introduction
TheGarage.com.au is an Australian automotive review and information website. By providing extensive reviews on cars, buy the author hopes to help people to choose the right car to buy. The website looks just OK to me but some of the reviews are cool.
Form
There was nothing in the index page that motivated me to stay when I first entered the site. However, case I must admit that I am not a fan of cars. Some images are nice but they are too far below and I have to scroll down alot to access them. The author might consider cutting down the text with additional links like “read more” for each review. I think that making the user scroll too much on the index page is not a good idea.
The first page is heavy because of the strong visuals. I thought there are nice images but they are abit far down. Why not move it closer to the top so that people see it once they enter the site? Nice images often attracts attention. I am also not too sure of the page header. I just feel that there are too much empty space in there.
The detail page of each review looks good and interesting. The images can be enhanced to increase the visual appeal. Under the review section, buy viagra the images of the cars are stacked one on top of each other which forms a long list again. The author might consider utilizing tables to organize the thumbnails of the cars to cut down on the scrolling.
Function
The top menu is pretty straight forward but I am not too sure of the left menu. People always like to search for something interesting in the left menu. The current left menu consist of boring resource links which is standard across all the pages. The white comment boxes that appear while hovering the left menu seems to be too big for me. The right column consists of long menu items on car reviews. The list is long and I think it should not be on every page. I would recommend putting other links such as advertisements or even remove the whole column altogether.
To me, the reviews on the different models of cars could have been better organized. Instead of listing all the models in one page, the author might want to categorize them into different brands such as “Toyota”, “Hyundai”, “Ford” and so on.
The author can work harder on the title and meta description of the pages. Every page should have certain targeted keywords to optimize. In many cases, the use of images for the headers are unnecessary. For example, the “Welcome to thegarage.com.au” in the index page need not be an image. Using images inappropriately can hurt the SEO of the page. All images used should also have alt tags. The author might want to use more h1 and h2 tags.
Conclusion
The car reviews are very detail and professional. I am sure it will help alot of people who are looking to buy a car. However, the image layout in the site could have been better. The author might also look into what to put into the left and right columns.