I think that's a great commercial website, better than the majority of commercial websites in existence today.<p>I would include several sentences about the business and a photo or two for perfection.<p>"BikeTek sells and repairs all kinds of bicycles, with an emphasis on left-handed 7-wheeled racing bicycles. We maintain an inventory of about 700 bicycles and can get anything you want in stock within a week."<p>I would also probably make it a minimally valid HTML page. But other than that, perfect.
Also, this is not bad, considering it's the 8th largest publicly traded company in the world: <a href="http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/</a>
So close, and yet so far...<p>Easy enough to make it useful - and look exactly the same - by linking the address to a map, the email to a sendto:, etc.<p>There's a fine line between "minimalist" and "inadequate". We're in 2011; I expect a website be simple yet intuitively, if not proactively, functional.
This reminded me of a pg quote:<p>“When you’re forced to be simple, you’re forced to face the real problem. When you can’t deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance.”<p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html</a>
So this is what it feels like when I hear people discuss art.<p>One side claims it's genius with everything taken away lest only the most pertinent information. Inserts a gobbit from Einstein on minimalism and strokes his beard in awe.<p>The other: it's dumb.
Has anyone ever done good research on how a minimalist web site might compare to a fancier version with respect to the various objectives of the site owner? Some other minimalist sites that perform quite well are Hacker News and Craigslist. Have site owners been mis-led into thinking that flashiness equates to credibility or customer satisfaction?
i don't know their audience but i imagine they're leaving opportunities on the table. still, it's better than many commercial sites who try to do more.
I would enlarge the font a bit, put more spacing between lines, and use a sans font.<p><a href="http://jsfiddle.net/wkmhm/" rel="nofollow">http://jsfiddle.net/wkmhm/</a>
I like it a lot. But I have two changes.<p>1) fix the non-parallel use of "Thur" - use "Thu" instead or even "Thurs"<p>2) no need for the "email:" line - just put the email
I hope that this style catches on - better than the blog templates most people use. Being a bike store I would have thought they'd list brands and specialities though.. It seems the site would only be useful if you know the shop.
I would link the email address, but other than that, it's nearly perfect. I agree a description of what they do would be helpful.<p>I treat my website the same way: <a href="http://nathanmanousos.com/" rel="nofollow">http://nathanmanousos.com/</a>
I expect to find this information without having to leave google maps. Store hours is the only reason I end up going to a website when I need contact information, which I despise having to do.
I like it - it should have a little styling though. Like a nice font.<p>It would also be cool if they had something that indicated really quickly what they did... visually, maybe a picture of a bike, or the store or something. Even better if the picture was animated like those other websites.<p>I like music too - maybe they could play stairway to heaven real loud as soon as I got there. That would be sweet!<p>Maybe they could engage me better if they had the text do something... like use the <blink> tag.<p>I tried to like this on facebook and share it on twitter after wanting to post it to digg -- but the buttons dont seem to load for me.
What I really like about it is you can find their store hours right away; countless shops here have that information very well hidden under unsuspecting links like "about" ("Impressum" in German).