I don't think that most people go to a site to sit back with a coke and bag of pop-corn to watch a slide-show. :) That and the difficulty of making decent slide photos is why I've never used one.
I understand that the products have to be paramount.
And I am a huge fan of the less-is-more theory and of all or mostly white sites in general. But all those sites you mention, they also all look good, very good. Great product photos are a given. But also nice supporting banners and colors. With just that, we could all forget about colors: just have a mostly white site with maybe some nice color on the main nav bar and very nice supporting banners. Like this site by one of our competitors (much larger than us): macktakmart . com
I'm a guy, so what I think looks nice gets constantly voted down from a woman's view point. I feel like Mel Gibson in "What Women Want." I've done some study indicating that the color of a site can affect men and women differently. For me, the default bluish All Business template (which I just came from) and the facebook-like IcAtheme template (which went through my best years) gets the best female feed-back.
I'm just trying Cherry Zen past couple days, and thankfully it comes with two good "female" colors: Purple/Lavender which I'm using and the Blue version. (I'm also interested in this template because I think it started it all re the horizontal nav layout and I may get in to zencart work.)
I have never been a fan of background images in general and only put mine up on the new Cherry Zen the other night, to see how it looks. Otherwise, I had an all white background (no img) and very well may return to it soon.
Suggested logo is only 164x90, but have not yet gotten to that.
But yes: I'm thinking that an all or mostly all white site is probably the safest...just so it doesn't cross over into boring.
sph
www.prommart.com
PS: Come to think of it, All Business and Cherry Zen were designed by women. Maybe best to go with that for a women's site.
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