Comments on website

[e-web solutions]

Hi,

We have changed our website. im not too sure on it and others are not too keen either.

could you please give me comments on what you think of our website and whether you think it would be a factor in why we are not getting too much business at the moment?

thanks

 

[kyber]

Hi James,

You are brave to ask this but I think that it is a good idea.

Further to my comments in the marketing forum, I have just taken another quick look at your web site, and have a few additional observations for you to consider (ignore or whatever):

key problem for me is that I can barely make out the menu so did not look at the additional content on my original visit. I had a better look around this time.

I think you are called eWeb Solutions. I thought this was what you did rather than the name of the company. Personally, I do not think this works but that is just my opinion. I guess it passes the "Ronseal" test.

I personally found your website hard to read. The key messages did not leap out at me at all, I had to make a real effort to aquire information about you. That said, I did like your pitch on the about page. Many would warm to that but I think you need help to sharpen it up and to promote it more effectively.

Some technical points:

When I launched the epas website to take a look at your work, I was asked for a userid and a password. There was no obvious way to look around without this.

You say you use web standards and yet you have a lot of old style markup. You even have font tags on the page declaring this as well as a lot of unnecessary table markup. (The Champmans website in your portfolio is even worse in this regard.) Most none technical people will not notice this of course but you do need to think about your own standards especially when you claim to be following web standards

The Eura Audit UK website launch link actually takes you to the epas website.

I hope that is of some help to you.

Stuart

 

[e-web solutions]

Does anybody else have any comments on the site?

It would help me and the company a lot if you did.

 

I have just posted on the PR board about it but noticed the new changes and to me all that needs changing now is the text.

-David

 

[kyber]

I see you have started making changes already. It is good to see the menu a little clearer. However, I suggest that you avoid making more changes for a little while.

I think you should go back to basics, sit down with the pencil and confirm your proposition and specific USP that you want to promote, think about the image you want to present and only then go back to the current web site to see how feasible it is to change it to meet those requirements.

Treat yourself as you would (should) a client rather than addressing this as a distracting overhead activity.

Pardon me ranting on. What you do is up to you of course and you may well completely disagree with me.

Stuart
PS. The logo and the strange photo do not work well together. I do not understand the point of the photo anyway.

PPS. Just out of interest? Why are there two Ws in the logo and no e or s? I think I like it anyway.

 

[keirms]

I like the feel of the website, the imagery, your logo, the colours and the way the pages are structured. It's a fresh, modern looking site.

If I'm honest I don't like the way it appears very "narrow" on my screen and I don't particularly like the copy. I felt it very hard to read and not particularly engaging. Your very first sentence is quite long and difficult to assimilate and because of that it doesn't inspire me to read on.

You also don't mention SEO anywhere. I think with the spotlight on search engines recently more people are looking for designers that can incorporate the necessary elements of SEO into their design.

Anyway, only my opinion. I hope it helps and good luck with it!

Regards,

Keir

 

[Jayne]

As a none techy customer, the site lacks excitement. Looks very plain and i'd be scared if I employed your firm, my site would also look dull. I think it looks sleepy, if you know what I mean. I think it could be the cool colour that are used. They are nice colours, but don't grab my attention. I think of cows for some reason when I look at it, like in the countryside. I don't know anything about the technical side, but I am the type of person who would be looking for your services. I'd like to look at it and think great, I want my site to be as good as that.

Best Wishes

Jayne

 

[e-web solutions]

Thankyou very much for your opinions. Me and one oif the designers will sit down and have a good look at it and see how e can change it.

and again thanks

 

[design@ews]

just to update you all, we now have a site in the beta stage of development. the portfolio and contact pages aren't done yet, but just thought I would post the link to get some early feedback

http://www.ews.uk.com/2.0/

Any feedback would be very welcome.

 

[Dread]

Version 2 is FAR FAR better in my opinion, however you still need to take out that table that you have in there. Also you shouldnt have any <img> tags in there, use CSS to display your images. Also you forgot to close your <head> tag.

Good Luck.

 

[JoyDivision]

I disagree, if the image is apart of the website design then use CSS for it, but if the image is a vital part of the site such as a logo then you should use the IMG tag.

The design looks fine to me there are a few issues though.

1) You made the vital mistake of making the changes live, you should have made a new directory so the old working site was still in public view. Under construction messages don't look good.

2) CSS should have really been used for the navigation system rather than using images for the text.

3) You say you validate all your code but I found several errors when I tried to validate it including images without ALT tags.

PS Edit I can't get version 2 to work.

 

must say, I agree with joydivision as regards images on the page, you have already hidden the header image in a div. Maybe the logo needs to go into one but apart from that, looking good. Live update is a bad idea unless you get two hits a day. I too got validation errors, though I couldn't work out two of them, maybe you need to use XHTML 1.0 validation?

Other than that, nice to see you attempting web standards. So much better than tables.

 

[Quan]

I agree with Jayne the Baker, well at least Version 2 doesn't work for me. In the eyes of a customer the color scheme is just OK but I think there is too much white space. I too would be scared to purchase from your site on first impression and on judging off your site. The bridge scene on top with two dull side bars look a little dull, and the whole site is a tad monotonious. The menu bar isn't aligned with the picture and I personally think it would look sharper, and that you didn't just slapped the site together. You need some FLASH, perhaps a slide show cycling through example store fronts or something interesting. You could definately use more animations and graphics and show some example sites or sites on previous clients. Free demo has become a standard in all E-commerce services. So in a word, you could do a better job selling it. I do like how it is to the point though and I understand it is not finished yet. Good luck your project and best of hopes.

Quan

 

[William Wilson]

Is there any reason why you omitted your location and address details I feel this is very important.

This seems to be a trend with many sites; I find it quite sinister not knowing the country far less the business address.

 

[Dread]

I find it rather ironic that the site boasts the ability to make clients web pages web standards valid, yet the site itself does not validate, its not a very good example.

Also you have absolutely no need for any of the javascript on that site, you could easily eliminate it all, consider doing so. Also your error handling for the contact form should be a little more graceful.

Keep working at it!

Dread

 

Agree with Dread, bin the JScript and use some CSS rollovers. Understand that the site isn't live yet, so my advice is put the old site back and take time to develop the new one. Don't try to rush it out, if you need any css advice PM me and I will try and help as much as I can.

 

[webdesignguy]

Also you have absolutely no need for any of the javascript on that site, you could easily eliminate it all, consider doing so. Also your error handling for the contact form should be a little more graceful.
Dread

While I agree that in theory your site should validate, if you take a look at a lot of big sites they don't actually validate 100%. Also there is nothing wrong with linking to an external JS file. It's just my oppinion but it seems that the world has gone web standards mad where everypart of a page has to be in a CSS file. Keep going with it and I am sure you will end up with a top class site in the end.

 

[Anonymous]

Webdesignguy

Could not agree with you more.

We should all try and keep to standards where possible, our industry should strive to achieve standardisation as it develops, BUT:

DON’T THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATH WATER!

There are people on here who are hypercritical of the slightest deviation from standards. Often they have home pages that validate perfectly, maybe even their entire site validates perfectly, but often their portfolio will include a CMS site or an OS Commerce site that will fail validation by a mile. Realistically the more functionality you give a site, especially when you allow users to update or include their own content, the less chance it has to validate 100%.

I will say again I think standards are a good thing and will always try and achieve them where possible, but it is easy to get pedantic about them and forget about what you are trying to achieve with your website.

Try validating any of these for example.

www.google.com

www.amazon.com

www.ebay.com

www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk

Emperor

 

[JoyDivision]

PHPbb like VB won't validate but I am sure if I was given 6 months I could write a good forum software package that was a) secure and b) complied to all the W3C standards.

With CMS's once you have third parties enterying data validation becomes harder but it may be possible to build a system into the CMS so ensure that only validated HTML can be entered. Commericaly though its probably not viable.

I managed to get one my CMS based sites to completely validate a year ago. For my final year project though I ditched PHP in favour of ASP.NET 1.0 and I had real problems trying to get that to validate.

 

[DarrenH]

Hi

My own business site certainly doesn't validate, lol

www.bigmix.co.uk

However, business is boooming and my customers don't give a stuff, they're more interested that I seem to come across professionally and that I care about what I can do for them.

Darren