Have A New Site Up, Please Let Me Know What You Think.
Business By Crustymuffin Updated 5 Sep 2011 , 6:09am by scp1127
After months of designing and codeing this site it is finally live. I would love some feed back on it.
do you see any issue with loading speed and or disply issues?
does it flow/navigate well?
does it catch your attention?
do you think clients get the information they need.
http://crazycakes.com/index.php
I LOVE it! Beautiful work, the flow of the site is great and very informative! Very well done!
crustymuffin: It definitely grabs your attention. No problem with navigating. Everything looks good to me.
Excellent web site, one of the best I've seen. Nice attention to detail, I especially liked how the Gluten-Free tag on the Menu tab matches the perspective of the plate in the photo.
A few minor suggestions: under the Services tab you might want to go with a vertical orientation to present the three types of services you have to offer side-by-side. In your menu you have a few flavors with an asterisk but you don't indicate what that means. And on your contact form the field for Name & Address of Delivery Location is a little too big, you may want to make that smaller and add a field for an overview of the requested design.
Site looks great . . but your cakes are what really takes the . . . cake!
Great cake gallery!
not really digging the calendar for the classes page. i'd rather they all be listed upfront rather than me have to look for them on each month or the year view. maybe the calendar view can be optional?
i really like the gallery. can't wait to see more of yall's cakes!
everything looks beautiful and well laid out! congrats!
Great site. On the "About Us" page, which one is Brian?
Good job on being up front on pricing.
Love it! Its fast, pictures are great, information is just right, not too much, but answers most of the initial questions a customer may have! Congrats on having it up and running!!
Great site. On the "About Us" page, which one is Brian?
Good job on being up front on pricing.
The guy on the right...the other one is Danny from "Cake Boss".
(Love your cakes & About Us page!)
I watched the show, and I was pretty sure, but she should clarify it in the pictures.
Very user friendly site. Your cakes flavors sound so mouth watering good. I'm blown away by how flawless your cakes look and the level of detail.
Thank you all for the feedback. We will try to incorporate it the best we can.
Quick question:
Did everyone see that there are 3 cake galleries to choose from on the Gallery page. It is in a drop down just above the play buttons. I'm a little concerned about how hidden that is.
I actually didn't notice there were three different galleries...perhaps having all three gallery names displayed as text links instead of a dropdown might help, or you could even merge the pictures into one gallery since the other two don't have too many pictures.
Also I noticed some of your cakes have copyrighted design elements (Star Trek, Air Jordan, Nintendo, LOTR, Guinness, etc.)...you may want to remove them unless you have permission from the copyright owners. Although I wouldn't be surprised if some of those cakes were commissioned by the owners themselves, if that's the case I would note that in the picture as it adds cachet to the cake.
Really, really like the site. Just wanted to add that I checked the site on my iPhone and on the About Us page, I couldn't scroll down to see all of Jennifer's bio. I could see there was text but couldn't read it.
"Also I noticed some of your cakes have copyrighted design elements (Star Trek, Air Jordan, Nintendo, LOTR, Guinness, etc.)...you may want to remove them unless you have permission from the copyright owners. Although I wouldn't be surprised if some of those cakes were commissioned by the owners themselves, if that's the case I would note that in the picture as it adds cachet to the cake."
I noticed this too Jason and was wondering why so many decorators even high profile ones get away with this?
I love the cakes, they're truly amazing. Could you specify whether or not the copyrighted images have been used with permission which is not unreasonable like Jason stated. It's just that if they aren't I find it ironic that your photos all say copyright of Crazy cakes and are possibly infringing on someone elses copyright??
Overall looks good, the gallery is amazing! On your flavors page my husband and I were both reading it, he is not that familiar with cake and had tons of questions about the difference between high ratio and sponge and was sponge a normal cake or angel food cake. So for the non-cake-savvy crowd you may want to describe them or modify the terminology slightly. Also on the menu there were several asterisks but nothing explaining why they were asterisked that we could see.
Congrats on getting your page up.
The Crazy Cakes copyright is for the photo rights the characters and IP is protected by the respected owners. I used to have something that stated that on the old site I need to add that back into this version. But some of the cakes you guys are questoning are from contests, other's were commisions and a few were for my kids.
The Crazy Cakes copyright is for the photo rights the characters and IP is protected by the respected owners. I used to have something that stated that on the old site I need to add that back into this version. But some of the cakes you guys are questoning are from contests, other's were commisions and a few were for my kids.
The commissions should be fine, but if the contest holders didn't obtain permission on behalf of the entrants then you should be very careful about displaying them. Cakes that were just for family can also be infringing -- normally this is not an issue since no one but the family knows about the cake, but by posting a picture on your business's web site you are dramatically increasing exposure as well as deriving commercial benefit from the picture.
I strongly recommend at least consulting your attorney (preferably one with IP experience) and ask their opinion on this matter.
I received a (nicely worded) cease and desist letter last month from Jack Daniels over the "Old Fart" cake that's in my gallery. Bottom line, they didn't care why I had it up, they felt I was infringing on their copyright and wanted it removed. My lawyer advised me that while there was an argument to be made for parody, it wasn't worth fighting over, so I took it down and the matter was dropped.
These companies ARE out there, scouring the internet for copyright infringement. I second Jason's suggestion to consult an attorney. My attorney had me remove even my University of Texas cake that I made for my husband's birthday, and the San Antonio Spurs groom's cake I once made. I've always been extremely careful about not posting character cakes on my cake business web site, and the letter from Jack Daniels completely blindsided me. Be careful!
kelleym, thanks for posting. I usually get a bunch of people telling me that I'm wrong or to mind my own business when I post about trademark infringement. So I usually don't comment anymore and they can find out the hard way.
My attorney told me that there are software programs that these companies use to scour the web to find images that violate their copyrights (trademarks are for names; copyrights are for images). It's not something they have paralegals doing manually, it's automated and they are very serious about it.
And even taking the pictures down now will not help, as the web is cached. This is a lucrative business for attorneys because it is so easy. The offender supplies all of the evidence.
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