Question

Topic: Website Critique

Moving Company Website Critique

Posted by Anonymous on7/20/2007 at 1:01 PM ET 125 Points
Hello,
Hoping the experts here can offer good critique for our new website. I've always admired your great abililities to help other people.

我有许多之前s suggestions, so I'm hoping to get an A! We don't need anything too complicated. In fact, we have a lot of business, so the purpose is to

A) establish our brand identity and image
B) make it easy for people to get an estimate and packing checklist
C) boost my portfolio to get more web design/marketing work

Thank you in advance!
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RESPONSES

  • Posted on7/20/2007 at 2:54 PM Author
    doh!

    www.moveitphila.com/index.html
  • Posted on7/20/2007 at 7:18 PM Accepted
    Hello, valyoooo
    I have few remarks on your website.

    First, what is the brand identity/image you were going for?
    Without knowing what this company does my first guess would be it is a grunge music group. Your choice of colors and the way pictures are edited are giving very depressing and gloomy feeling.

    An estimate page should not look different than the rest of pages, as it makes people feel they were redirected somewhere else.

    Packing checklist is a pdf file, and you should let people know about it. Some people don't have Acrobat reader installed - what about them? Don't you want to let them know where to get it from? I don't see why you need to have it as pdf file at all anyway. There are only 2 pages there, not 24 and it could be easily fit on one html page, which is better for indexing and does not break navigation.

    As for addition to your portfolio, I would recommend to correct little mistakes before you do that.
    One mistake I noticed is that on some pages you have "Experienced. Reliable. Fully licensed..." as a link going to home.html (which makes no sense).

    On some of the pages you have no link for "Estimate request".

    You should check how heavy your pictures are - my ADSL is quite fast, but it takes a little while to load a page there.

    Another thing I didn't like is a pop-up window (don't know what it was, I have them blocked) which shows up when I click "skip intro". You really don't want to annoy people with pop-ups and if there is something important chances are many people won't see it.

    Flash intro is an overused template, poorly done as it is slow and does not really say anything.

    I really hope this helps

    PS: OMG! I just noticed you have all the text there as a picture! Bad, bad, bad, very bad idea! How do you want to be indexed by search engines if you don't have any text there? And that is why it takes forever to load a page! Text is your ONLY option.
  • Posted byNatashaChernavskaon7/21/2007 at 9:04 PM Member
    Dear valyoooo,

    Here's my input.

    First of all, the intro is bad. It has no meaning, carries no important information, it scaled the window of my browser, and it launched music I didn't wanted to listen to. Complete turn off. Most of the clients will leave right there. (Up to 95%). Besides, you have used Flash, and my firewall didn't let it launch until I turned the firewall off. Another turn off.

    Your website texts are made as pictures - another bad thing to do to your website from the SEO point of view... Search engines' job is to index the content. They will check it, find nothing, and move to your competitor's site! Do you want the delay in putting your website in the search results in the search engines?

    White reads bad on striped red, don't like images, even though you wanted to put some style in the project, but it turned out not that good.

    Buttons packing checklist and estimate request are not even! One of them forced me to launch adobe acrobat, which I didn't want to do, another turn off (you should have warned your visitor that another application is launching).

    Depending on the section the whole layout moved left or right, it means that the coding contains mistakes.

    In commercial section a man's body turned to the past. Bad designer's mistake. In the "home" page the tip of the left shoe is misplaced. Poor girl has lost her toes.

    Besides, you don't use meta tags like keywords and description anywhere besides your intro index.

    The whole impression is a bad web project, usability will get my 1 out of 5. And it looks like this project was done by a print designer which has no idea about how to lay out web projects.

    I recommend to review this article, it may help:

    Usability and Navigation: How to Make it Work at artographica.com

    https://www.artographica.com/usability_and_navigation_how_to_make_it_work.h...

    Whatever happens, I wish you good luck!

    Natasha Chernyavskaya
  • Posted on7/23/2007 at 2:53 PM Author
    Thank you all for your critique. I have a few questions I'd like to ask before I basically start over from scratch.

    1) Client likes having a fancy flash intro, but I agree that it takes too long. I think I'll take your advice and dump it. Any ideas on integrating something fancy?

    2) The black and white posterized photos are an attempt to look different from all the same old same old that is out there. These guys are not your run of the mill movers, they are more rock and roll, hipster types. I hadn't seen it through your collective eyes that it looks cheesy, needed that insight. I'll try Peg's suggestion to do something fancier.

    3) Packing checklist being a pdf - doesn't everyone have acrobat by now? I wanted to give them something they could download and print. The file already exists as a pdf, so I thought I'd just put it in as a link and be done with it. I have no idea why it froze Peg's browser (?). If I indicate that it's a pdf, will that suffice?

    4) text as art files — I noticed the slower load time too, but they're only 12k. I added a preloader script on the home page but it didn't make much of a difference. I was hoping to get greater control over type instead of just verdana/arial.

    5) Also, I put the copy in the alt tag, so doesn't that get indexed?

    6)谢谢for the grammar check, discerning is the word I was looking for.

    7) Yes, I am a print designer. Guess I have a lot to learn.

    Thanks,

    valyoooo
  • Posted on7/25/2007 at 3:22 PM Accepted
    Hello, valyoooo
    1) The one you have right now is not fancy. If your client insist on having one - get a decent template, but remember to have options to skip/turn off sound and consider that most people will skip it anyway

    2) Check websites likewww.sxc.hufor images (free and good quality) orwww.stockexpert.com(1$ per image, even better quality) - you'll sure find something there

    3)关键是——我想被告知和choose whether I want to download something. Have it as a page with a link to download file - that way you have both options covered

    5) alt is something different. Google for SEO to understand how pages are being indexed by search engines, it's not that simple

    Hope it helps
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