Hills Florist
- Store: Hills Florist
- Creator: Simplified Web Design
About The Store
“Opened by Ted and Beatrice Hill in 1977, Hills Florist has been providing beautiful fresh flowers, innovative designs and quality service for over 30 years.”
The Store Design
The store is designed and built using XHTML and CSS. The clean simplistic lines bring out the vibrant colours in the products themselves, and ensure there are no distractions to the customer.
The crisp clean look of the Hills Florist Home Page. The black background really brings out the vibrant floral colours and patterns shown in the product images.
The important shopping functions of Cart (or Shopping basket as it is called on Hills’ webstore), Account and Search are encapsulated within a top-menu style navigation bar. I like this technique because it keeps these from distracting a user during shopping, but ensures they are ever present when the customer is ready to use them.
This screenshot shows a segment of the Hills Florist category pages. You can see the typically attention grabbing 'Add to Basket' buttons and the highly contrasting product images on the black background.
The use of vertical space here could perhaps be changed to bring more of the second row of products ‘above-the-fold’, an important way of getting more products in front of the user sooner. The add to basket buttons are prominent as they should be and the price is very clearly visible.
The Hills Florist checkout page is very minimalistic. The table borders and divisions are removed which make the page look very clean, but I fear also makes the contents seem to just be floating, without any order.
I think the cart page lets the store down a little bit. The totals are not in clear view and the user has to scroll down to see them (on a lot of common resolutions). The page elements don’t have quite the same put together look as the rest of the site. The remove function is quite prominent on the cart page, which probably isn’t sending the right message to customers. I know this will sound nitpicky, but the default green tick icon in Magento is aliased on a white background, which gives it funny visual artifacts when used on the dark background such as this.
I’ll be voting a 4 stars for this one, I’d be interested to hear what you think?
Author: Ashley Schroder
I'm a Software Engineer from New Zealand who develops web stores to export New Zealand products to the world. Over at my magento development blog I blog about developing on the Magento ecommerce platform including my magento email extensions.Ashley Schroder has reviewed 5 Magento stores for Magento Parade.
I give this store a 4 star rating also. Its well designed, has a simple elegant layout, and shopping would be a breeze. My only complaint is that the pages seem to load a little slow.
I give this store 3 stars. Simple web design, easy to understand product description and nice layout.
The main draw back is that the user have scroll down a lot. Everyone will be impressed by seeing this store – it also attracts customers. The background of the cart should be changed as it is not that impressive.
My rating is four stars.
I think the cart page marks the store down a little bit and the page elements are not the same . We need to scroll the page completely down. The background color is also not so attractive .
Something is missing here!
Florist are only messengers … delivering a product with a greeting card attached.
Could not find the message entry for the card and a separate line for the signature.
????