New IT company website

[slavelle]

It's like the Cobbler's children having no shoes. I own an IT support company and I also do web design. For the last few years, my website has not had any updates and looked like "an IT company's website". I didn't even have web design as a service that I offered on the site because it just didn't look like a web designer's site.

So, I have done a complete facelift and put it up yesterday. I may get to coding this in a more traditional html/css way, but for now, it's completely Xara Designer Pro 6, except the Blog, which is a regualr wordpress.org blog that has been custom templated to match the rest of the site pretty well.

It's live now - love to hear your thoughts.

www.technicalrs.com

[angelize]

Very nice! A great site, nice colours and easy to navigate. Well done.

[gsthunder]

Now that is a GREAT job!

[bcire68]

Nice job. The only minor thing that I might change about it is to give your text links a different mouse over color. I would use either the traditional blue for links or the green theme color that you use for the rest of your site.

Eric

[xtom]

Looks great I agree with more mouse over use on the links.

[slavelle]

Hey - thanks for the comments so far.

In regards to the link colors: Since there is only one set of colors, I used them in the "body" text. This meant that the colors (both shades of the green) had to work on white - and the bright one is pushing that. So the top ff the page links and the footer links are not using the "website defaults". To make them have hover states, I would need to do them as popups, which would be ok for the ones at the top on a black background, but the ones in the footer can be a bit of a hassle to look just right.

If you look at the top of the Blog page, this is what I wanted to happen but I had to prioritize to getting it out on deadline and the mouseovers up there lost out. When you can code directly, obviously you can have as many combos of color links as you want based on the CSS.

I will get to fixing those things either in another iteraction of this Xara file or when I recode the whole thing is html/css.

Would love more comments...

[slavelle]

Bump...

[Scotty]

Nice site Steve,
I find it hard to believe that you have just updated it when you give so much information here on design.
Jim

[slavelle]

Yeah - well...Life happens and my business has been going well this year. sad but I just haven't given my own site the attention that I give to others. And this is a release of the site with new content - the web design side of the business. the rest of the content on the site is the same as it used to be.

I had put it off for long enough and it just needed to be changed. We were involved in a local trade show and had to get brochures and things created and I wanted to change the whole look around a bit, so that trade show became the deadline for the site launch. From 2003-2008 it was a really small and pretty ugly site. In 2008 I updated it with a lot more content and a newer look that wasn't bad then, but I think my 2010 release far surpasses what I had before.

Also, I'll be interested in how it does for search. My other site was pure html and css for the most part. It ranks in google very well for some things I want it to. First page organic placement for things like "computer support canton georgia" and "web design canton georgia" (without the quotes of course). Google still has the old site in the index and hasn't yet done a read on the new site. Since it's the exact same content (plus some) and the same meta informations, page titles, etc (actually a bit more info in some areas), I expect it to perform similarly. I will be reporting back here on this as I know a number of folks are interested in how Xara sites perform. This should be a pretty fair comparison, I think.

[Solar]

Very Nice. Easy to maneuver.