New IT company website

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

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

Now that is a GREAT job!

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

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

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...

Bump...

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

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.

Very Nice. Easy to maneuver.

I took a look at your IT Website, it looks great. I have a question though, how did you place your services navigation bar with content of the page showing on the same page on Xara web design? I have been trying to this with no luck

Edunroyal: I'm not sure I understand the question. See if this adds anything: The only thing I ran into with the two bars were that I didn't want the Services bar to be on all pages, so I had to do each page seperate. Same goes for the top nav. Since the Home page has the navigation in a vertically different space than the rest of the pages, I wasn't able to use a "site navigation bar" for that either.

While this made it more of a pain to build and will make it more difficult to add to/maintain, it does still have a lot of flexibility and some shortcutting vs the "old way" of manually building the whole 9 yards because I can just add an item and paste onto the appropriate pages "in place".

Does that help?

Hey all,

I said I would respond back to this thread when I had a better idea of how the replacement site is working from an SEO perspective. Well - now Google and the others have found and indexed a lot of the new site, though there seem to be a few remnants of the old one still hanging around in there...

Anyway, the performance for the terms that I am trying to get seems to be about the same - possibly somewhat better because of the addition of web design and laptop services to the pages. Attached is a snapshot of my analytics graph. You can see a spike at August 18, as that's the day I announced the new site. So before that spike is the old, hand coded, purely HTML and CSS for the most part and after the spike is the new completely Xara site with no tricks to force things like H1 tags or <p> tags, etc.

So, for all those concerned about SEO performance, maybe this will give you a little faith that a Xara site can perform as well. In fact, I've also attached a second graphic which shows the time period since the new site upload and the same amount of time prior specifically for google search results, which takes out the extra traffic that talkgraphics itself generated.

Hope this is useful to someone - even Xara maybe. :cool:

nice website, i like the color combination. What did u use for the Get New Updats Form? I also want a form for my website. :D

gutterleech: The form is a placeholder with an html form in it which then has a small php script behind it to send the mail to me. It's not really an "updates" thing - but a simple way for me to "add them to the mailing list". This will be converted to a MailChimp signup at some point, but I need to recode this site in standard HTML for that to really work the way I want it to...

I may never get around to it - I'm really busy lately and paying sites come in front of mine being recoded! :) Also, I am coming up with the "lightside" alternative to this one - a version with a lighter feel, just to show a few different ways that it could have been done and will allow the site visitor to choose which one will come up.