Posted: 9/2/2008 7:36:01 AM EDT
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I spent the weekend producing my new website. I need feedback as to appearence, layout, ease of use and any other suggestions you can think of. Dig deep as this venture was a leap of faith and I need it to be right. Please point out any obvious errors to me. www.milestoneexec.com |
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Looks pretty damn cool. I'd add a 1px border to the pictures and make them the proper size, as they're HUGE and take a bit to load. Font size is different across some pages, I'd fix that too. And on the homepage, there's a big white gap in the text between "search" and "North" "Milestone Executive Services is your solution for critical professional search _______________________North America" Other than that it looks really nice, very usable and laid out. 
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I would use a generic email address rather than specific name @ company - first name is personable but makes it appear like a small shop also not sure about placing the names & companies of recent placements on the first page, could be good or bad but putting the names of client companies lets perusers bypass you other than that pretty good |
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The images need to be properly resized in photoshop or another imaging editing program and then used on the website. Making the browser do the resize makes the images look distorted. Use subject specific email addresses on the site and then setup an alias or forwarder on your mailserver to send them to the appropriate person. This way you make a change on the email server when a person leaves or changes departments. You won't have to update the email address on the website then. -Foxxz |
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W3's HTML validator service (validator.w3.org) reports 380 errors on the first page. Most of those errors are probably things like you didn't put a closing tag in on a <meta> tag or you left out the "alt" attribute on an image. Web design is MUCH more than making pretty pages. Writing pedantically correct HTML is a starting point. Then you will be able to tell if any inconsistencies between browsers are a result of your HTML being funky or if it is from some idiosyncrasies between the browsers. Different browsers will "fail" in different ways. For example, if IE can't find an image specified it will display the red x people talk about here. In Firefox, if it can't find the image it will display the text of the "alt" attribute, but won't display a broken image icon. Sometimes there are no right answers, just varying degrees of wrong ones. For the site I maintain (www.jrenee.com) one of my pages uses custom HTML attributes and since W3's validator won't use my custom DTDs, validation fails. |
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The page doesn't resize properly. Opening a browser window that fills half of a 1900 x 1200 screen and I lose the last line in the "What We do" section. You also need to re-write the text on that opening screen; there are 11 sentances, 6 of them start with the word "we." You would probably be better off with bulleted lists of principles and actions. Also, the resized image on the screen was not properly resized; at full resolution the objects in the image are jagged edged. As has been mentioned previosuly, you should use a generic contact address for the page, if you are attempting to give the impression of a more professional operation. Individual contact information can be provided on a 'contact us' page if you feeel it is necessary. The mailing address should also be moved to that page since the address is clearly not somewhere where people can drop in, there is no need for it to be on the home page. ETA - you are missing capitalization and hyphenation in a number of places in the text on the site. |
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Visually it looks ok, from a technical standpoint its not good at all. Its not optimized for much of anything so the only marketing you're going to get done with it is Pay Per click advertising or publishing your own ads for it in the paper etc. Really the only thing you can use it for is web presence. Its amazing what they get away with code wise on these templates, heres a snip from the code, as you can see its a mess, theres no way you need to close 60 nested font tags like that: </font> </font></font> </font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></strong></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><strong><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font color="#000000"><font face="trebuchet ms,geneva"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="2"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"><font size="-0"> |
Some tips at personalweb.about.com/od/optimizinghelp/a/02searchengine.htm |
Yes, primarily because we are retained, and these are long term clients. The key reason is that when potential new clients reach the page, they can see who we have worked with and that encourages them to call. It's always a tossup in our business, but note that these are large companies. It in no way says what we are working on at the moment. |