I recently got a chance to take a look at Crestock's new beta site. I tend to be the type of guy who likes checking out the latest and greatest, so I figure I'd take a gander.
The previous version of the site (up at this point in time, though will likely get replaced in the near future):
The super hot beta version:
From the front page perspective, things look decent- I'd argue that the new header legitimizes the site a little better than the older version. The old version did a good job at keeping things simple, but at the risk of being a little stripped down to be really professional-grade. It's interesting that in this version they're going for a left-justified layout as opposed to their previous version which was floated in the center. This style of design has been around for awhile- some retailers like Best Buy and a few news sites (CNN at one point?) were fans of the left-justified feel. The barren feel is mitigated on Crestock's new site by a 100% width header, which I think makes some sense.
Upon login, things go a bit downhill though:
While the design is improved by a really well done sidebar, this is a classic case of just cluttering up your page with stuff that really doesn't need to be there. They have a floating div on mouseover that shows your current weather, they display local time, they show a flag of your country. All of those I likely know or have a quick Dashboard widget (or Yahoo widget or what have you) to tell me those- they simply aren't necessary on such a site. This isn't really a Crestock issue as much as a general issue all developers tend to face. It's always cool to add on that extra little feature or fill up more of your page with some new functionality, but you still have to keep your eyes on the prize: does this really help your users? Sometimes less is more-- much more.
The good news is that usability for the major parts of the site are great. Quick sidebar access to my photos I've previously bought, a very clear and clean photo page to display details of the particular image you're viewing, and just a very straight forward process explaining how to use the site. I find it interesting that they're adding a public profile section to the site, like most other sites. digg, for example, added their own social aspect to their profile pages. This is a trend we're probably going to be seeing the next few years. If you already have accounts on your website, you have a lot to gain to just make the switch into public, social aspects, and it's usually not a real pain to add that functionality to your site. (I haven't had a chance to check what Crestock's functionality there is quite yet- at this writing they were working the kinks out of a few lines of code in that particular section of their site).
All in all, not a bad refresh for Crestock. Beyond superficial aspects like design, though, I really wish we could see more projects like this take results public. For example, in my last posting about CD Baby's new design, I mentioned that it would be really cool to see how that impacted conversion rates. Likewise, when a bigger company like Crestock changes their site up, it would be great to get behind the scenes thoughts on how the redesign impacted their bottom line, which aspects turned out to be crucial and which might have surprisingly gone unnoticed. Naturally, there's some trade secrets to guard here, but I think there's some general purpose thoughts that would be interesting to a wide variety of John Q. Developer Public.
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