looking for criticism on first project

[connormac]

be real, i can handle tough criticism. it is a price-comparison service for college textbooks, i did all the design + coding work with the exception of the logo design. i'm looking for feedback on all aspects of this thing, and have plenty of time and resources to make changes.

http://www.pagenerds.com

get at me.

 

[dchuk]

congrats man. What'd you code it in?

 

[connormac]

congrats man. What'd you code it in?

php&mysql backend, backbone.js/ICanHaz.js/mustache.js frontend

 

[justo_tx]

Does the site work or do you just have dummy data in there now? I went to chegg to find a book to search for and tried both ISBN numbers and neither returned the book.

This is the book I used for a test search:
MKTG (with Marketing CourseMate with eBook Printed Access Card) 5th Edition by Lamb | 1111528098 | 9781111528096 | Chegg.com

 

[Kiopa_Matt]

Nice. Clean, simple, gets the point across right away. You asked for criticism though, so here's my suggestions:

• The auto-suggest list items are WAY too big, and honestly, I'd probably do away with the auto-suggest list all together. Use the same concept, but an inline iframe that appears, and is scrollable. The auto-suggest list is messy. Iframe that's as wide as the search box, maybe 450px in height, is scrollable, and will list all books matching the search via AJAX.
• When viewing book details, use a popup panel in the middle of the screen, instead redirecting users to another page. Click a book, popup panel appears with details, background goes opaque. Click close on the popup panel, and they're still at their search results.
• Scrape more data from Amazon (description, publication date, etc.).

 

[nickCR]

Site design: It clean and clear. You should consider adding a little bit more life in the left box below the search area. Maybe show a screen of the price comparison, etc.

Functionality: The search button text isn't crisp and the about us / contact us are hidden on Chrome 15.0.874.120m. Attached screen.

It looks fine on FireFox though. Simply put you need to do a better job on your CSS or fire the guy that made it and get someone that knows what they are doing. That should never ever happen with a correctly coded page. Only problem you should ever run into on cross platform is margins or paddings giving more spacing than required.

BTW the search button doesn't work on either browser FTL.

Going to any internal page results in going back to dev.pagenerds.com vs pagenerds.com. ( this happens when I click the logo ).

W3C Result: 92 Errors, 13 warning(s)... uh fix that shit.

In closing: You have a great idea and a good domain that you can rape with but you can't release it like this, fix it up man.

 

[emp]

Didn't get any prizes or comparisons.

::emp::

 

[PrizeGenius]

The "search for textbooks" "about" and "contact us" buttons don't show up correctly (using Chrome). Also, after I had searched for a book, the "search for textbook" button would not take me back to the original search page.

Looks good though, has potential once the bugs get fixed.