Please Review My IT Consulting Website

[larryxyz]

Hello,

I would appreciate your comments on my new IT consulting website, in terms of the written content and the overall "artistic" look-and-feel.

This is a very basic site that I developed myself using Intuit's online tool "SiteBuilder".

Thanks in advance.

Larry

[KevinM1]

Looks like a solid, no frills site to me. I am getting an odd brown rectangle just below the "Request Information" form on the index page.

Any reason why the form on the "Rates" page is on the right instead of the left?

[larryxyz]

Looks like a solid, no frills site to me. I am getting an odd brown rectangle just below the "Request Information" form on the index page.

Any reason why the form on the "Rates" page is on the right instead of the left?

1. I removed the odd brown rectangle. Thanks for catching that.
2. Are you saying the request form on the Rates page should be on the left to be consistent with the other 3 pages?

[KevinM1]

2. Are you saying the request form on the Rates page should be on the left to be consistent with the other 3 pages?

Not necessarily. I'm a newbie when it comes to design as well. Just curious about the thought process behind the decision.

[shovenose]

I like this one a lot better!

[RDesignista]

Hi,

Your site is really just too plain. I think it's only okay as a backbone.

If you take some time to look at "minimalist" sites, you'll see that a lot of style can be achieved by simply playing with text sizes, shadows, fonts, and general typography.

For your paragraphs, please use text-align:justify and add some line-height.

Please change your header picture. I know you want to appear knowledgable of MAccess, but there are other ways to do it than putting a screenshot of MAccess! Most of your clients will have no clue what that is.

-R

[Fireproofgfx]

Hello Larry,
The site is very boring, due to it being so plain and it won't interest a lot of customers in your product. Furthermore, the SEO (search engine optimization) is very poor and won't help with google searches so people my not find your site when they look for it on Google.

Sometimes these template sitebuilder sites will hurt you more than they help you. Case in point, there are 61 errors and 14 warnings just on the home page report. So basically your site needs a lot of work before it would be technically web friendly and actually beneficial to you.

[larryxyz]

Hello Larry,
The site is very boring, due to it being so plain and it won't interest a lot of customers in your product. Furthermore, the SEO (search engine optimization) is very poor and won't help with google searches so people my not find your site when they look for it on Google.

Sometimes these template sitebuilder sites will hurt you more than they help you. Case in point, there are 61 errors and 14 warnings just on the home page report. So basically your site needs a lot of work before it would be technically web friendly and actually beneficial to you.

I was not aware of the errors in the HTML. That's an interesting point. But both IE 8 and FireFox do not report any errors when displaying the url, even when I set my options to "Display Every Script Error". So, how can these errors hurt me?

I'm aware that that the look-and-feel of the site is plain or boring. I have received good suggestions regarding font techniques, etc. But at this point I'm trying to project a kind of non-nonsense, "hard-working" image, so maybe "plain" is better...?

Thanks,

Larry

[KevinM1]

The errors are HTML errors. Specifically, that the code generated by the software you used to build the site doesn't adhere to the HTML 5 specifications. What that means is that you increase the likelihood of things not being rendered properly across platforms, not behaving properly during JavaScript document manipulation, and negatively impacting accessibility as adaptive technology like screen readers may not be able to handle your site's pages the way you think they would be handled.

In short, you should always make sure your site gets a clean bill of health from the w3c validator.

[Fireproofgfx]

You need good code for SEO purpose so yes you should run it though w3c Validator. I would highly recommend adding a Jquery rotating banner that highlights Kawasaki, Yamaha and Denny Corporations, since those are HUGE. I work for a Congressional Candidate here in WA who is also an IT Consultant who has consulted for Boeing, Russel Investments and Swedish Medical among others and we use those names to our advantage because people are familiar with those companies so I recommend you do the same, it will go a long way.