Archives for May 2007

Fathers day is coming up and if you haven’t already purchased a gift for your dad or husband you might want to visit Designer Gifts, an online gift store, and check out the Gift ideas for men section.

I’ve actually been asked to do do a full article of the online store Designer Gifts. I’ll begin with the look and feel of the site.

I quite like the colors that they’ve chosen for their website.

Do you see the colors in the site logo at the beginning of this post? The whole layout is white, yellow and purple. They’ve used rounded corners on the borders of the navigation menu and listing headers and I really do like that look, although, on the main page, the sections highlighting some of the feature sections of the site seem a little crowded. Perhaps if those sections had a bit of white space between them it might be a little easier on the eye. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with the design or layout of this site, I’m just stating my own opinion and preferences.

I’m sure that the menu has been designed so that the items that they sell most frequently, or the sections that they find visitors go to most often, are listed near the top, however the sales section is listed at the bottom and my preference would be that it be placed closer to the top of the menu as I think many people going to a site to look for gifts would be interested in checking out what’s on sale first.

The menu itself is quite nice. Use your mouse to hover over a section and an additional menu pops outward to show you sub-sections in that category. The only problem I found with the menu system is that while using FireFox and Internet Explorer I can’t see the very first item listed in the sub-menu for the Gift Baskets category, nor the Picture Frame and On Sale!!! section. The on sale section has the largest submenu, perhaps the website owner/designer is aware of this problem and that is why they placed this category at the bottom of the menu section.

This isn’t a huge problem because if you go to the main page for the categories that I listed as not being able to see the full submenu you can still see all of the sub-menu listings in the form of well designed thumbnails for each sub section of a category.

When you are looking for a gift for someone, but you are on a budget, it’s always nice when you visit a site that lists gift ideas either in a shop by price manner like Designer Gifts does, or that has a Cheap gifts section, which Designer Gifts also does.

The Cheap Gifts section has banners or image headings similar to this one, on the right, throughout the section. I quite like the way the “signs” are written as I like the font and the color of the lettering but I’m not sure I like the masked bright idea man quite as much. If he were only here and there throughout the section, I might like him better, but he’s all over the place in that section. Again this is my personal opinion. I think the bright idea man is kind of cute and I’m sure others would love the guy. I just think he might be overused to some extent.

Now, the real meat of any store, online or otherwise is the products that they sell. I found a few very small problems with the sites design, but I have absolutely no problem with the items that Designer Gifts sell.

All of the items appear to be quality items, well designed and seem to have been picked out for the store with care and attention to detail. I took a peek at the gifts under $15 section and I was quite surprised to see some very nice items that I’m sure would cost at least twice their price in a retail store.

One of the gift ideas that I really like, that can be found in the Picture Frames section, are the Digital picture frames. I think that this would make a really cool gift idea.

This particular digital picture frame is on sale for $99.00 and it’s made by Mustek. I used to have a scanner made by that company and I can vouch that that they make good products.

This picture frame can display hundreds of JPEG photos. The photos are stored on SD, MMC, Memory Stick or other popular memory card formats. Use the frame to display a selection of photos or an MPEG movie. You can even add music to your display for a full multimedia experience.

I’d never really taken the time to look into these Digital Frames before, but now that I have finally taken a look at whats available I’m quite pleased with the technology. Don’t you agree that a digital picture frame would make a wonderful gift?

Take a look at the Designer Gifts store yourself and see if you don’t also think that they have a wonderful selection of gifts. There must be 1000’s of items to choose from – go check it out and let me know if you bought anything.