Burnout
Overall experience, the design while keeping in mind what it's for.
Okey dokey.
I'll have to warn you in advance though that you won't like what I'm going to say – I'm very brutal when it comes to UI design, and I point out
every little mistake that most people don't give a rat's behind about. Anyway, consider yourself forewarned.
With that saidÂ…
Here's the numbered reference picture I'm using:
1) Why do you have two of the same logo? Also, the logo itself isn't very strong – the circle around the large
F is okay, though forgettable (you might want to try and make a dingbat to represent the company). The font is okayish, though awfully trendy – more importantly though, it's
very difficult to read, especially the first logo with that obnoxious drop shadow. I would have never known it said "CSES" unless I read it in region
6 (which has its own problems, as I'll outline later). Also, the logo is incredibly cramped – you want to give your logo lots of whitespace, lots of room to say, "Here I am!". I'd suggest that you use the amount of space that you're using for both logos, and combine them into one big space for one big logo.
2) Why do you have two of the same navigation bar? Redundant navigation is a terrible idea. Those who know what it is will be annoyed by it, and those who don't know what it is will be confused by it. Scrap the right-side navigation, make the horizontal navigation larger (it gets
totally lost in between the logo and the advertisement), and make it obvious in your navigation where the user is – for example, make "Home" bold when people are on the Home page. (Well, do more than just make it bold, please – change the background too or something like that.)
BTW, navigation that shifts around when you hover over it is bad news.
2A) This is also redundant. Get rid of it.
2B) Again, redundant. Also, a well-designed website never needs a site map, unless it's ginormous (50+ pages, usually).
3) Search
what? Does it search the static pages, or the forums, or…? Also, make that icon to the right of it clickable – not everybody knows that you can just hit "Return" after entering information into a field, and if somebody clicks on that icon and nothing happens, they'll think that it's broken, which is
not the impression you want to give for a site that sells services. And remember that we're talking about Joe Average here, not somebody like me, who knows that it's not broken because the progressbar doesn't show up. I've watched "normal" people use computers – they don't pay any attention to things like that. If they click on something that they think should be clickable and nothing happens, they think it's broken.
4) This ad is rather obnoxious. Get rid of at least half of the information on the left side – only include just enough important stuff to get people hooked ("Optimized Search Engine Registration" will
not get people hooked. Incidentally, that phrase means nothing – optimized for who, what, why? Just trash it. *Poof!*). I like the blue swoopy thing though, because it directs one's attention to the price, and fills the whitespace nicely. The fonts are ugly though.
5) If you follow my advice in
2, you shouldn't need this. More *poof!*
6) This is a
header – make it BIG! By making it this small, it looks self-concious, as if the company is only saying "Welcome" for formality's sake. Make it big and really WELCOME everybody to your site.
6A) First off, there's a grammatical error here (you forgot a comma), but that's not the main point (though grammatical mistakes always turn off people). Again, this is a header – Make it bigger! People scan, not read webpages. Give them something to catch their attention while scanning. It looks timid.
7) Most people will look at this and have no clue what it is. It doesn't say anything about your company – it doesn't establish trust, it doesn't give a feeling of quality, it doesn't say "Friendly service". All it says is, "Here's some random picture of something."
8) These links look
exactly like the headers (another reason to change the headers, BTW), and it's damn near impossible to tell that they're links unless you hover your cursor over themÂ… thing is, you always, always want to make it obvious that a link is a link,
without forcing the user to move their cursor over it first. I know "designers" hate underlining, but just do it – it's a web convention that every Joe Average knows.
9) This just screams "Little cutesy Javascript that I picked up even though it has no relevance to my website whatsoever". Get rid of it – people don't need and don't want a second Back button.
10) This'll
really confuse people. You're trying to sell web services, yet you have an advertisement link to an external company that's also selling web services. This twisted logic could induce brain cramps in some.
Okay, now that I've been thoroughly rude, I hope your ego isn't too bruised.
A lil' harsh criticism never hurt anybody though, right?
The coding, well, you can't really critique that. Since we sell web design, we wanted to start to get accustomed to CMSs, so we had to resort to creating templates, and that's about as far as the coding goes, without getting into editing all the PHP files created for and by the CMS, which I don't really think needs to happen.
Well, let me just say one quick thing – please at least try to get rid of the
<head> region that's at the very top. Having two heads in a document is bad beyond bad (and especially since it comes before the XML declaration). I thought browsers weren't even supposed to render a document if it had more than one head (they're more lenient than I thought, I guess).
[edit]: Oh, BTW, one more quick note: "CSES" is very awkward (I'll bet you anything most of your clients won't remember it, and only the "Fusion" part). Try to work on that.
