General

[lizkaraffa]

Loves

• Really too much to post. It. is. gorgeous.

Opportunities

• [ ] I really like the mobile menu with your current setup, but what will it look like if the user has a bunch of top level menu items? Seems like the side by side nature of these elements https://cloudup.com/cAIuME9ChKp will get awfully crowded or not as legible when you get more than 5.
• [x] I put an <a> tag into a post/about page and it is not discernable that it is a link. Probably needs some styling for links.
• [x] Pretty sure this is a browser thing, so there might not be anything we can do, but when autocomplete happens in the search bar we get this in chrome/firefox https://cloudup.com/cBoM5f6oAoR
• [x] side margin on mobile for the About page feels a little awkward for me with the blockquote https://cloudup.com/cVf8Fj55vz4
• [ ] I think the theme could use a little help if the user has a ton of menu items. https://cloudup.com/c4QoGHxXMwg Maybe not, cuz it is ridiculous to have this many, but maybe some in between help.

[update 8/15] Navigation

• [ ] while you talked about having sub-menus only being for shop items I think that might be too opinionated for the needs of users. If for example the shop has consistent blogging with categories about new releases, etc, a likely scenario would have sub-menu items for them. And if people are wanting to keep things clean they might have a few top level navigation items with a lot of children items.
• [ ] Assuming we stick with the idea of sub-menus only for shop navigation the layout is slightly awkward for sub-menus if there is only a parent category and not a child category as well. i.e. the design accounts for a store setup with parent categories of turntables, gears, etc, and then subcategories of say microphones, cables, etc. under gear. But a lot of stores might only have top-level categories (.i.e just tops, bottoms, swimwear, etc) and so the layout feels a bit awkward and with a lot of real estate used up when sub-sub menus don't come into play.
• [ ] Lastly yet still related, on mobile navigation, all the top level navigation gets shown horizontally, which we already talked about, but then the submenu and sub-sub menu stuff shows below. How is that supposed to work when 2 top-level navigation items have sub-menus. See this gif to illustrate http://g.recordit.co/WeVpO0X2cc.gif In the gif, the different navigations show because of hover, but obviously no there is no hover on mobile. It wouldn't make sense to have all the sub-menu items show because you wouldn't know what parent they belong to with the current design. A possibility is having a caret next to the top level item so you can click to show the sub and sub-sub menus of parent/top level navigation. Unsure how to proceed on this.

Clarifications

• How will the theme handle spacing for sub-menu items that are only a few items? I.e. with the sub-menu for shop it works really well because there are a lot of menu items so it pretty much fills up all the space in a way that is really pretty and clear. Let's say About has a two sub menu items such as Contact Us and FAQ. How is that going to work? Will Contact Us and FAQ be horizontal to each other and on the far left of the screen? It seems like that would be confusing that they belong to About. Here's a screenshot https://cloudup.com/c7ZEVPVkLCj that I took when messing around with what you've currently got going on in case there were only 2 menu items for About. This is what I think the theme would currently do, and I'm not sure it's super clear. Let me know if you need more clarification on this.
• When a user adds an item to the cart, how will it be clear to them that it's been added? WPEC out of the box has a fancy notification that basically pops up a modal of the cart and lets them checkout or continue shopping. https://cloudup.com/ch9lC4pXmCl I could see this tying in really well with your cart slide out where when they add an item the cart slides out showing it and maybe just add a button to continue shopping which closes it?

[jptksc]

Opportunities

• I'll work on some updates with the menu if more than 5 top level items.
• Thanks for the heads up on the unstyled links
• Yeah, not much I can do about autocomplete styling (a browser thing)
• I'll fix that margin for the blockquote.

Clarifications

• My thought was that sub-menus in the header would be exclusively used for shop categories. I modeled this after most of the modern commerce sites I had been looking at for inspiration where shop categories use the main menu space in the header and other site related menus are placed in the footer menu. I can play around with a 2nd menu style, but with any approach the end user is going to have to be smart about how they integrate content on their site.
• A little confused on your add to cart question. As I've mocked it in the demo, adding something to cart would slide open the "side" cart displaying all items that have been added to the cart where you can then continue to checkout or close to continue browsing. I suppose I could add an animation that fades in the new item added to the cart to make it more obvious to the user.

[lizkaraffa]

@Circa75 Gotcha regarding the cart comment, I think I missed that the cart auto slides out. That is perfect!

[lizkaraffa]

@Circa75 I did some styling for the <a> tags. Color by itself didn't show up well unless we break out of black and shades of gray. I played with some underlining. Not sure I love the effect but you're a much better designer than me so I'll leave the final call to you.

[lizkaraffa]

@Circa75 I updated some comments above in opportunities that I've been running into while I've been translating your theme into a wp-theme. Even if you don't have time to execute the solution, it'd be great if we could hash it out together a bit and I try and execute.

[jptksc]

@lizkaraffa

Regarding links in paragraph text, the dotted border looks fine... nice work.

Regarding sub-menus, I won't be offended at all if we just need to re-build the pop-up menu to better suit WP eCommerce users. Do you have some examples of menu UI/UX you think might be better for this theme?