web design question

[sunama]

Portfolio of previous work.
Price.
Speed of email responses.

...in that order.

I had a quote as high as £1200, which I thought was scandalous. I had quotes as low as US$290, however, their previous work was akin to the websites which were made in 1998.

EDIT: Do bear in mind that because we are not trading yet, money is tight. The idea is to get a web presence for the lowest cost. Once we start trading, my aim would be to have a brand new website built by a local web developer, with a budget of around £1500 - £2k. At £240, in effect, this is a throw-away website, which can be discarded without too much financial damage.

 

[sunama]

Tell them to use better Anchor text than 'Home' for the menu too - maybe a well keyword for your site.

I was thinking of doing away with 'Home' on the menu. Clicking on the company name at the top of the page would send the user to the home page, thus allowing me to get rid of 'Home'.

One question: what would be the point of getting rid of 'Home' in the menu?

I've noticed that large corporations usually don't have 'Home' in their menus, so there must be something to it.

 

[simisker]

I was thinking of doing away with 'Home' on the menu. Clicking on the company name at the top of the page would send the user to the home page, thus allowing me to get rid of 'Home'.

One question: what would be the point of getting rid of 'Home' in the menu?

I've noticed that large corporations usually don't have 'Home' in their menus, so there must be something to it.

There's no hard and fast rule to having a dedicated 'Home' link - on the one hand, it gives increased usability. On the other hand it may take up space in a navigation section that would be better used by something else. It tends to get junked by designers who place greater emphasis on aesthetics over usability.

Might as well keep it in; it's not detrimental to the site, and users don't like to think - even though the 'click on the logo to go to the home page' paradigm is commonplace, it's not explicitly intuitive.

If analysis of the site statistics show that it's not being used and you need the space for new nav links, then that's the time to reconsider.

And if you do keep it in, keep the text as 'Home'. Anything else and you're putting a thought-hurdle between user and site. In fact, change it and you may as well remove it and rely on the 'clickable logo' paradigm, as it essentially has the same level of abstraction.

EDIT:

Okay, I've had further thoughts on this. Free advice - you lucky person

This is a rare case where 'Home' is actually a relevant word that could pertain to your services, so there's potentially an element of confusion. Users may click on it expecting residential removals [as opposed to business removals]*.

Additionally, if the 'Home' link was removed altogether, the first link a user would see would be 'Services', a much more useful place to send them, and probably more where they'd want to be on the site initially anyway.

So I've changed my mind from above: remove the 'Home' link altogether. The users can probably get by with a clickable logo and/or their back button.

* Never, ever, underestimate the myriad ways in which a user can think [or not think, as the case may be]...

 

[sunama]

Thanks for the advice. So now your good self and suarve, are both suggesting the removal of 'Home' from the menu.

I've always thought of having 'Home' in a menu as necessary, however, I've noticed that as the internet matures, many websites are doing away with this and allow the homepage to be reached by clicking on the company name.

I can see that there can be some confusion with what 'Home' actually refers to.

Anyway, where possible, I shall be incorporating the advice in this thread into the next version of the site, which should be complete in the next few days.

Many thanks.

 

[suarve]

Thanks for the advice. So now your good self and suarve, are both suggesting the removal of 'Home' from the menu.

I've always thought of having 'Home' in a menu as necessary, however, I've noticed that as the internet matures, many websites are doing away with this and allow the homepage to be reached by clicking on the company name.

I can see that there can be some confusion with what 'Home' actually refers to.

Anyway, where possible, I shall be incorporating the advice in this thread into the next version of the site, which should be complete in the next few days.

Many thanks.

[shameless-plug]

Shameless I know, but I actually wrote a short blog post about this recently

http://www.web-design-talk.co.uk/145/improve-seo-through-home-menu-anchor-text-optimisation/

[/shameless-plug]

 

[sunama]

Thanks for that.

 

[sunama]

Right. We've moved through a few more versions of the homepage and we have:
http://ugsoftware.org/transport/home1.8.html

'Home' has gone and so has the logo.

I'm happy with what we have and now the other pages shall be worked on.

Of note is that the web company is very quick with their updates and the reason why its taken such a long time for us to reach this stage is the fact that I am extremely busy. In general, any alterations requested by me are carried out and delivered the next working day.

 

[suarve]

Right. We've moved through a few more versions of the homepage and we have:
http://ugsoftware.org/transport/home1.8.html

'Home' has gone and so has the logo.

I'm happy with what we have and now the other pages shall be worked on.

Of note is that the web company is very quick with their updates and the reason why its taken such a long time for us to reach this stage is the fact that I am extremely busy. In general, any alterations requested by me are carried out and delivered the next working day.

Is the site down as nothing is loading up for me........

 

[sunama]

I just checked. Its working fine for me.

 

[V4NT0M]

Looks ok, I guess fine for what your needs are, the title text seems extremely generic, I hope you'll be getting some kind of logo in there.

Personally I'm not sure on the cheesy American looking couple with the pick up truck in the main image, firstly it looks too American and secondly I assume removals aren't done with a pick up truck.

The other images look good, that one just throws me off again it looks too generic.

 

[sunama]

Looks ok, I guess fine for what your needs are, the title text seems extremely generic, I hope you'll be getting some kind of logo in there.

Personally I'm not sure on the cheesy American looking couple with the pick up truck in the main image, firstly it looks too American and secondly I assume removals aren't done with a pick up truck.

The other images look good, that one just throws me off again it looks too generic.

The funny thing was that all the other images were chosen by me. The main pic (of the couple) was chosen by them.

Its a good point about the pick up truck though.

Logo shall be added at a later date.

Right now, all I want is a functional website that doesnt cause us embarrassment.

Thanks for your critique though and I might look for a more suitable main image.

 

[sunama]

When I had to outsource a small site they had a tendency to cut corners and simply use an image, where there should have been text. E.g. your yellow box at the top should contain a background image and the writing to the left should be text.

I've asked them whether we can have text instead of images, in some areas and they said I could. So this isnt an issue. The problem is that by default, they will use images, unless I specify that I would like text on images.

Latest version:
http://ugsoftware.org/transport/home1.9.html

 

[suarve]

I've asked them whether we can have text instead of images, in some areas and they said I could. So this isnt an issue. The problem is that by default, they will use images, unless I specify that I would like text on images.

Latest version:
http://ugsoftware.org/transport/home1.9.html

Hmm, looking at that design all the text should be text imo. If they are giving you large areas of text as images they're just being slap dash.

 

[sunama]

One thing they did say is that if they use text instead of 'text on images', the smoothing effect that photoshop is able to generate for the images, will be lost. This means that if we use text instead of 'text on images', the look of the website won't be as asthetically pleasing.

This concerns me, so I decided to leave the (company name, phone number, email address) and the menu, as images - bear in mind that all this information (including the text in the menu) is written on the same page, elsewhere, in text.

Everything in the footer (except for the copyright notice) will be in text.

 

[suarve]

Personally if it was my business, I'd be willing to sacrifice a very minimal amount of text smoothing for bigger SEO benefits (E.g. more search engine visibility = more business). To be honest, you'd be hard pushed to see the differences as they have used a plain font.

From an SEO point of view, repeating key terms (obv. wiothout spamming) is good and better than just styating the word once.

Make sure they get all the links titles and alt text spot on now

At the end of the day, I guess it depends on what you want your website to do - be a tool used for gain business or purely as a basic web presence.

EDIT: just out of interest, why wouldn't you make the copyright notice text? Seems wird to have it as an image.

 

[sunama]

From an SEO point of view, repeating key terms (obv. wiothout spamming) is good and better than just styating the word once.

I was unaware that repeated terms are better. I shall bear this in mind.

Make sure they get all the links titles and alt text spot on now

Will do.

At the end of the day, I guess it depends on what you want your website to do - be a tool used for gain business or purely as a basic web presence.

Getting search engine hits is important.

EDIT: just out of interest, why wouldn't you make the copyright notice text? Seems wird to have it as an image.

I was only thinking in terms of search engines, and I'm not bothered at all whether or not a search engine picks up our copyright notice.

Thank you for your advice - it's very much appreciated.

 

[sunama]

HTML version 1.0 is now up.
http://ugsoftware.org/transport/site/html/index.php

I've asked for some changes to happen, starting Monday. However, one issue I'm undecided on is the text size of the site. To my eyes, the text is very small. Should I ask them to increase it?

 

[suarve]

Just quickly ran it through the validator and wasn't really surprised to find a whole 72 errors on a small website. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=h...(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0

Could get rid of pretty all of those if the developer who did it followed basic xhtml doc type rules. This was exactly how it was when we used a very cheap offshore company during a busy period - personally I believe due to the stupidly low costs they have a very limited amount of time for development.

Just a few other points that stood out:

• Can't understand why they've used h2 for for the text 'london uk removals'.
• Hope they don't try do do what they did to us (and what you have currently) - simply put the company name on every page.
• You also have not meta page descriptions - again you should have a keyword rich and unique one of these for every page.
• On the testimonials page, seems a bit weird to have a dashed and solid line seperating each testimonial.
• On the quote form, last field - it says provided a detailed description of the stuff you wany moving - the textarea is tiny.
• You have basic javascript input validation on your contact form (inoput for all fields and a valid format for email). However, you seem to have no validation on your quote form - surely this should be the priority with most validation as you don't want crap coming through.
• They also have lots of slapdash code in their tables (E.g. adding an inline attribute for align on each and every td - we has css for this now - slapdash

If you're bothered about being found by search engines (as you've mentioned) I also ask them if they are submitting the sites to search engines, creating a valid xml sitemap and submitting this, signing up to things like google webmaster and Google analytics (if they try to charge you for the latter two, tell em to get lost as it's a 5 minute job as most).

Saying all that, it's better than some of the stuff we were sent. Just out interest, how much roughly did you pay for this?

 

[sunama]

First off, thanks for the analysis. I've made a note of your points and I shall put these to the developers and see what they say/do.

I've already ran through some alterations which need to made. These will be submitted tomorrow, so they can work on the changes on Monday (India are 5hrs ahead of us).

The total cost of the website is around £240. We paid 50% before the job started and the remainder shall be payable after the job is complete.

One thing I am finding is that when issuing the alterations, it can take many hours to detail the changes, in photoshop, ie. I have to put in arrows pointing to stuff and ask them to make a specific change.

The very first version of the homepage was:
http://ugsoftware.org/transport/home.html

So, as you can see, after many alterations, we've come a long way.

 

[sunama]

Another question: What did you think of the text size of the whole website - does the text size need increasing?