Wanted: Website Review my latest

[boxerdog]

please can i have your thoughts to my latest site, only just completed it so there will be some tweaking needed.
all feedback is very much appreciated

ruval.co.uk

many thanks

wayne

 

[Systreg]

Hi Wayne,

I'll be as kind as I can, it's ghastly

The colour scheme gives me a migraine just looking at it, makes reading the black text difficult as well, I would honestly change that to something nicer.

 

[boxerdog]

:cry: i tried so many colour schemes and really liked that one :cry:

 

[Systreg]

Sorry mate,

I don't mean to sound horrible, but it is harsh on the eyes, dark colours don't go well on dark backgrounds, I pretty much have to highlight all the text on the page to read it, see if you can find a good combination using this colour palettes site:

COLOURlovers :: Palettes

 

[boxerdog]

are you on about the black text on the homepage?

 

[deconstruction]

this is a great site for picking colours kuler

 

[Systreg]

Yeah, the black text on the blue gradient background.

[edit]

One other thing, is it a good idea to have Adsense on there, say for example, a company where you live visits your site, they click on an Adsense ad for some nationwide valeting service and book a valet for their fleet of vehicles, you get a few pennies for the click and lose out on possible business to a competitor, is it worth it?

 

[boxerdog]

oky dokes chaps many thanks for the help

 

[davedevelopment]

I like Color Scheme Designer 3 for Colour Schemes.

There's a few things I'd do here

• "page2.html" could be "services.html", or even better "valet_services.html" etc
• I'm skeptical about images for nav links, particularly image map ones, but that could just be me
• 27 images @ 217kB, use Smush.it to improve that load time
• Get a phone number on the home page somewhere
• Get some H1, H2, H3 tags in there somewhere, including the use of the words "Valet", "Valeting" etc

 

[ribble-valley]

Without wanting to hurt your feelings this site is pretty bad, so many things wrong with it, right idea but just poorly implemented.

However, I was once in your position so this is a 'tough love' situation and I'd be more than happy to help you in the right direction with some free design advice in a well laid out email with steps to assist you in making it better. Alternatively you could employ my paid for services.

I think my services could be of genuine, beneficial use to you. See my recent post in minisites. I'm also a fan of classic BMWs and have detailed many a car so its a subject I am familiar with.

Best wishes

Paul.

 

[boxerdog]

oh god, i didnt think it was that bad:cry:
oh well delete the whole thing and start again i suppose.

spoken to a few of my close customers today and they loved it

 

[retired_member13]

Surely it's more important that your customers (who probably don't spend 22 hours a day at a PC) like it than a bunch of domainers?

I don't like it personally, but that doesn't make it bad.

 

[accelerator]

oh god, i didnt think it was that bad:cry:
oh well delete the whole thing and start again i suppose.

spoken to a few of my close customers today and they loved it

I think it's a reasonable site, but it would be better if all the nav buttons were the same colour, had the same font size, and perhaps were smaller.

I would also recommend using a font size unit that can be resized by the user in the browser, i.e. % or ems.

I think the text "The Professional Mobile Valeting Company" could be reduced to just "Professional Mobile Valeting" and made bigger.

Don't forget to use some decent keywords in your title and description tags, use business service plus geo location.

Rgds

 

[ribble-valley]

oh god, i didnt think it was that bad:cry:
oh well delete the whole thing and start again i suppose.

spoken to a few of my close customers today and they loved it

I don't think starting again will help you though, it looks like lots of hard work to get where you are already with this.

If those adsense ads are competing with you I'd remove them first, they're not of any benefit otherwise. Use the space gained to give yourself more space for the site content.

With some very helpful comments from others in this thread, I'm sure you'll be glorious in your quest in no time at all.

 

[davedevelopment]

Don't scrap the whole thing!

Just tweak and change, you wont go far wrong.

 

[boxerdog]

thanks guys i realy do appreciate all your comments, "even if a little hard to swallow"
i am trying to make the changes slowley but as i have no experiance in web design what so ever its a slow process.

thanks again

 

[retired_member32]

people tend to like simplicity in design now,generally in my marketplace (finance) you tend to use fixed width (centre) without borders so it is worth looking around at sites in your field and see what is popular,it did remind me of a site maybe 5-10 years ago when garish colours were vogue or dodgy warez sites...

 

[davedevelopment]

Simple is good these days, first thing I do nowadays is grab a CSS framework that has decent typography, such as Blueprint: A CSS Framework | Spend your time innovating, not replicating. That's most of the work done, you just need to tweak colours etc.