Website Review and Suggestions

**scott botkins** · 05-25-2009, 01:46 PM

http://www.invisionblue.com what do you guys think? I have it in wordpress and add on to it often.

**davidj** · 05-25-2009, 02:11 PM

thats a really nice site

**VirtuosiMedia** · 05-25-2009, 02:32 PM

Hi Scott, welcome to the forum. Your site looks great. It's decidedly un-Wordpressy, which is a good thing. It shows that you can really use the software in a non-basic way. Your images are also crisp and clean and you've steered away from using a lot of stock photography that is so common in a lot of sites.

A few quick suggestions:

It might be because of various Wordpress plugins, but your HTML doesn't validate. Your CSS does, however.
On your front page, I'd suggest making it even more obvious what you want users to do. You're real close, but I think using big buttons in your three boxes on the front page would improve your click-through-rate. Make sure to put special emphasis on the most important.
Your front page slider is just a little too fast. Perhaps slow it down by 0.5-1.0 second?
Don't forget a favicon.
Your tagline, "where the creativity and innovation comes alive" should technically be "where the creativity and the innovation come alive", but would probably read best as "where creativity and innovation come alive".
I tried out your quote calculator and selected the most difficult or time consuming options. In my opinion, you're charging far, far too little for the quality you're apparently able to deliver. I'm not sure about what the competition is like in your area, but I think that you could easily charge 10 times that without a problem.
Also, by listing estimated prices directly on your website, you make it hard to adjust a price for difficult clients or clients with difficult jobs, hard to raise prices in the future, and easy for your competitors to gather information about you. I would recommend getting rid of the quote calculator and charging on a case-by-case basis.
Along similar lines, I would get rid of the coupon code. You're good enough that you don't need to compete on price. Set your prices high and compete on quality and customer service instead. You'll get better clients and you'll make more at the same time. Figure out what you need to make yearly to be comfortable (including taxes and expenses, so take what you need and add 33%), divide that by the number of days and hours you want to work per year, and you'll arrive at your hourly rate. For each project, estimate how many hours you think it will take and then double it and charge that. If you think that sounds crazy, consider this: almost every project takes longer than you estimate, you may have downtimes without clients, and your time preparing quotes, meeting with clients, and marketing is all unpaid. You need to factor those in.

**davemies** · 05-25-2009, 02:45 PM

looks and feels really nice, but

increasing text size a couple of notches breaks the layout

not sure there is enough contrast between the lblue background and lighter blue text

**carterdea** · 05-25-2009, 05:22 PM

I like it a lot, my only suggestion is that you make the text bigger on the bottom half.

Also, it says 'Since 1998' on the sticky note, but your copyright says 2005-2009. I understand maybe you changed names or something, but I think you really ought to clear that up by saying 1998-2009 or since 2005. 3 years is a long time and it sorta proves you're not old fashioned. haha.

Good luck.

**kramboi** · 05-25-2009, 05:32 PM

WOW, I love it bro.

**kaseyb** · 05-25-2009, 09:38 PM

really like the colors and graphics, they really pop...i feel there needs to be more of a focus, my eyes arent sure where to look first when i first load the page..

**scott botkins** · 05-26-2009, 02:42 PM

Thanks for the feedback guys, I plan to get some of those things mentioned completed over the next few days.

**LadynRed** · 05-26-2009, 03:21 PM

The only validation errors I see are the complaint about that nasty <embed> tag ( there are better ways), and a minor warning about a missing attribute on a table. Other than that, I'm not seeing any drop-dead validation errors.

It's a really nice design for one thing, definitely not 'wordpress-y'

I do, however, have a couple of comments:

The blue text on the blue background is really not a good contrast, anyone with a visual impairment, especially some forms of color-blindness will have a problem seeing that blue on blue. The text is also awfully small, 8.5pt - and pt's are for print, not for web. You really should be using at least em units for text so that the text can be scaled for those people who find 8.5 way too small to be readable.

As to the wording - I understand you're going for keywords in your text of "Cincinnati web design' but, frankly, I think it's over done. You have "affordable Cincinnati web design services" - ok that makes it sound like there's some different kind of web design called "cincinnati", and, to me, it almost sounds like you're limiting yourself to only Cincinnati, which you clearly are not. Using kewords in your text is one thing, but when readability and meaning suffers, it's not a benefit. I built a web site for a plastic surgeon once, and they sent me a page, clearly written by some 'seo expert' that had 'the history of plastic surgery' in the text about 100 times ! It was monotonous, it read badly, and I reworded most of it because it just wasn't written for PEOPLE, it was written for a SE spider!

**clsgraphics** · 05-26-2009, 04:06 PM

I thought it looked great!

**scott botkins** · 05-26-2009, 06:32 PM

I've completed some of the feedback/ideas you guys gave. I do have a question, I put a big green button under Hire Us Today that says "Contact Us Now" but was wondering is that best to put or is there something else I could put for more clicks?

**xuroq** · 05-28-2009, 09:26 AM

Its nice to see a decent site in the reviews section for once.
The big green button looks good where it is.
You don't have a shortcut icon, so you may want to look into that.

But especially, as you are obviously a Wordpress fan as well, the site is very good.

Did you design all the graphics yourself?

**xuroq** · 05-28-2009, 09:31 AM

Oh yeh, also you do not provide any links to working sites that you have designed, only images. Clients will want to see working projects

**scott botkins** · 05-28-2009, 02:08 PM

Thanks I'm going to add the favicon today, I have to figure out what I want to use for it. Most likely I'll use an "ib" of some sort.

**eollis** · 05-28-2009, 11:36 PM

Scott,
I would suggest using .png's for those images. I'm on a 1Mbit connection and they don't load too fast. Also, in your portfolio, the [1][2][3] tabs at the bottom don't show what tab you are on. Its not much of an issue with only 3 but when you get more pages someone might forget what tab they are on.

**davemies** · 05-29-2009, 05:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eollis

Scott,
I would suggest using .png's for those images. I'm on a 1Mbit connection and they don't load too fast. Also, in your portfolio, the [1][2][3] tabs at the bottom don't show what tab you are on. Its not much of an issue with only 3 but when you get more pages someone might forget what tab they are on.

why pngs? most if not all have quite a lot of blends/gradients (if you're talking about the site shots) that won't reproduce well with 8-bit png, and 24-bit png is significantly larger than a reasonable quality jpeg. the problem is that the images need optimising more efficiently

those jpegs could be about 2/3 or 1/2 the size.

**xuroq** · 05-29-2009, 06:07 AM

It really does not matter what format you use of the shortcut icon, as they are so small anyway (usually 16 x16) there is no noticeable difference in loading time. However png/ico formats can have a transparent background which can be useful.

**davemies** · 05-29-2009, 06:12 AM

that's why i asked if you were talking about the site shots

but in your previous post you suggest using pngs to reduce load time
"I would suggest using .png's for those images. I'm on a 1Mbit connection and they don't load too fast."

**nysilly** · 05-29-2009, 08:36 AM

**** I was going to put my website up for review but ****, this is not the amateurs forum.