The following is a paid review: I took a look at BetterBathrooms.com and here is my review of the site…
I was impressed with how nice the code on the better bathrooms web site looked. While the page does not validate, they managed to maintain a nice clean structure to the HTML and it appears they went to great lengths to make sure it works properly in many versions of Internet Explorer. I applaud the developers of this web site.
Moving on to the question of social media, the have “Follow us on” links for Facebook and Twitter, which many would consider a requirement for any business/web site these days, though it looks like it’s mostly a broadcast medium and there hasn’t been a lot of dialog with users/customers thus far.
They’ve also got a blog which could be useful to subscribe to if you were into bathroom remodeling. I personally don’t even own a bathroom, so I’m not really in the market for such things… I didn’t even know you could get Heated Towel Rails, but they sound awesome!
The About Us section has some well done videos, which is refreshing to see. So many companies don’t place enough value on well done videos, and either do it themselves (poorly) or have it done cheaply by folks who really don’t know what they’re doing.
Visually the site is well done. I’m not a huge fan of the color scheme, but I think this is more of a personal preference. I’m going to assume the designers stuck to the brand-approved colors when creating the site. Some of the icons appear a bit more “cartoony” than I’d like, but again, it doesn’t really detract from the site. They got so many other things right, I can forgive the small things.
I do have on small complaint about the functionality of the site. I tried to right-click on a link to open it in a new tab (it was an image with a link) and a Javascript alert popped up saying “All images on this site are copyrighted” which I found offensive. First, if I want an image from the site, I can get it it. This will not stop me, or anyone with any technical skills who wants an image from the site. Second, this discourages sharing. Perhaps someone bought a sink and wants to post about it on their own blog… should they be scared to take an image from the site to use? Third, it breaks functionality. It’s completely normal to right-click on a link to open it in a new tab/window, but they have make this much more difficult on their web site. That’s not cool.
Overall, BetterBathrooms.com is a nice site for creating better bathrooms, and the annoyances are pretty minor, so well done web designers and developers!