I’m a fan of American Chopper so I went to take a look at the Orange County Choppers website. Fairly impressive design, and very appropriate for the company, but I see some things worthy of a review, so here it is.

Style:
Love the style. A dark, red and black design, it has the look and feel of some of their best bike designs. It’s a first class design, and I give them high points on style.

I particularly like how they’ve integrated bike images thoughout the design. Even if it’s subtle shots of custom painted tanks, or a little chrome, much of the imagery used in the site is images of the bikes they produce.

Nothing is left undesigned. Every detail seems to be designed to fit an extremely unified theme.

A little whimsy is always good. Photos of Paul Sr. and Paulie are very serious, but they throw in humorous photos of Mikey to break it up.

Structure:
It’s a fairly straight forward CSS layout. Should be reliably represented in the most recent versions of all major browsers. I was surprised to see that the CSS is embedded rather than linked. This would make in necessary to change each page to make global updates to the CSS. This seems like a mistake to me, but there may be a technical reason.

Load time is fairly reasonable at 25.25 seconds on DSL or 75.19 seconds on 56K modem. With all of the images they use, I’m surprised at how low this is.

The CSS in general is reasonable, but it could be done better. I see a lot of Class selectors in links for instance. This could be done in a more elegant fashion by defining different link styles for the different ID selectors being used to control the site layout. I wouldn’t rule out the use of Class selectors on links entirely, but I’d think I could get rid of most if not all of them.

There are places in the site where ID selectors are used multiple time in a page. This is an error, and the sort of thing that’s just not acceptable. Some minor changes to the CSS and it’s use in the site structure would eliminate this problem.

While the design is quite superior, the execution of the details of the site lack a little something. A lot of images lack Alt codes for instance, and a number of scripts types are left undefined. With the attention to detail in the design, the lack of follow through on the execution of the design surprises me. It may be that the site has been edited and added to by someone other than the designer since it was created. This would account for the attention to detail in some aspects, and the lack of attention in others.

One minor little annoyance that I saw was a nice little video that plays when you arrive at the home page. Annoying, not because I didn’t like it, but because even on my large monitor, it was below the fold. I heard the video playing, but couldn’t see anything until I went looking for it. Though it appeared to be an ad, it’s still poor placement choice. Anything auto-playing needs to be above the fold. The alternative I suppose, would be to keep it from auto-playing.

Content:
Bikes, bikes, bikes… and of course bike merchandise. Fantastic photos, good graphics, decent written content. There are also some very nice bike sale brochures available in PDF format. High marks to the graphic design who does their print design work. While I liked the PDF brochures, the ability to look at larger images of the sale bikes without downloading the PDFs would have been nice. High marks for content on the whole.

What I would change:
I’d change very little over all. The style is very well done, and I’d shy away from any changes there. Instead, I’d improve the execution of the existing design. Adding Alt tags to all images would improve the ability to search, and adding script types to scripts should improve their reliability across browsers and platforms.

I’d also make an effort to clean up the CSS as well as linking the pages to a remote CSS rather than embedding it. This would make global style changes to the site much easier. Updating the CSS to make better use of the ID and Class selects would also make updates easier.

Summary:
A very nicely designed site, that could use a little polish behind the scenes. Quality web design deserves quality execution of the design.

Trackposted to Perri Nelson’s Website, The Random Yak, Faultline USA, basil’s blog, Blue Star Chronicles, Stuck On Stupid, The Pink Flamingo, The Amboy Times, Cao’s Blog, Dumb Ox Daily News, Conservative Cat, Random Dream, and Pursuing Holiness, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.