Professional Opinion of my website

[Boy]

I agree with the others, the site looks fine, but why not take advantage of the advice that you solicited? I don’t think the designer’s critique is just a malicious putdown of your website – although his recommendation to redesign the whole site seems out of order – and I think you can learn a few things from it.

1. I suggest you add a logo of Clark Condo so that a visitor knows straight away with what company he is dealing with. It might also ‘embellish’ the site a bit. As mentioned, a favicon with the logo might be nice too
2. A mobile version might be very useful, especially for those who are in the area looking for a place
3. It loads very fast on my computer but see also point 7.
4. The alignment of the prices is a matter of taste. It looks fine to me
5. There is a footer but I suggest you add links to the various pages and reduce the size of the current buttons
6. A contact page is standard practice nowadays, so why not add one? You can also say something about the company (and Levi Marcus). A map of Clark with the various property locations might make the company and its services even more accessible
7. In some of the slideshows I find some pictures redundant (Ritzville, The Palm Villas) but overall I agree that for such a site a lot of pictures is a good thing. However, on most pages the text right below the slideshows is rendered as .PNGs. I suggest you replace these with actual text. That will reduce loading speeds and increase SEO effectiveness.

PS: I noticed that since starting to draft my post quite a few others have posted as well, so perhaps some of my remarks are repeats.

[gwpriester]

Jenny - The site loads instantly for me. I suspect that if some people have slow connections then there is a lot of content. But I suspect your market for these units have lots of money and high speed access.

The look and feel of the site work and the clean design suggests the condos are elegant and have clean design.

[Boy]

digitalPhaser. Captain Kirk often told his crewmen to put phasers on 'stun'. I think yours is stuck on 'kill'. How about turning the phaser to 'off' and engaging in a dialog which encourages people to do better and doesn't just kill any enthusiasm or pride they may have? You raise interesting points, but none of them - absolutely none - are such that would prevent this site from being successful.

Pauland, what a great way to tell someone to tone it down a bit!

[digitalphaser]

Jenny, don't be alarmed by digitalphaser - his empathy switch seems to be permanently 'OFF' and while there is truth in his comments they aren't things that should really alarm you. I completely understand that after reading post #6 you might be heading straight for web design hell - you aren't...

All that I have said. I say to myself.
I can praise my 3-year-old daughter for a scribble. But here adults ask adult questions.

I evaluated the design from the point of view of the consumer. I have a lot to buy and order via Internet. Commercial site that not very well implemented is always alarming. This is not my experience. Google Analitics is not just a piece of javscript code. This is a powerful system for collecting information and statistics.

Part of design flaws can be compensated with functionality, interactivity, usability. Comments, polls, reviews etc. For example. But with XWD it's problematic.

I did not tell Jenny: «All is bad. Leave this matter.» Conversely. «Forward and fight». I've listed a simple but fundamental things.

«All praise me, then all is well.» It's a bad way.

Captain Kirk often told his crewmen to put phasers on 'stun'. I think yours is stuck on 'kill'. How about turning the phaser to 'off' and engaging in a dialog which encourages people to do better and doesn't just kill any enthusiasm or pride they may have? You raise interesting points, but none of them - absolutely none - are such that would prevent this site from being successful.

I don#t read about Captain Kirk. But I can quote another person:
«Everything should be questioned»

Jenny does correctly. She doubts.
I'm doing this for many years and all advise.

Have a great day everyone.

[digitalphaser]

digitalphaser, you are not a troll.
I appreciate the interest you are taking in helping others.

Acorn

I don't take offense. Everyone has the right for opinion. I respect it.

[pauland]

digitalphaser, you are technically right, but absolutely blunt in the way that you deliver advice and have no feeling for where the OP stands in her technical knowledge of web design in comparison to yours.

I have no problem that your advice is good, but in many ways it is inappropriate.

Xara is about enabling people to create websites without technical knowledge. Xara creates good websites, but not perfect websites.

You need to encourage people, not demolish them under a mound of technical niceties as though they were essential.

Everything you say is true, the way that you say it is awful - it suggests that your advice is essential for the site, when it is not.

It's not about avoiding criticism, or seeking further knowledge and improvement, it's about providing appropriate advice for the skillset of the recipient and being honest that it's advice for improvement rather than a necessity.

In Britain there's a saying that people often use when they are rude and arrogant "I call a Spade a Spade" (no racial slur) and in the US "I tell it like it is". It's no excuse for the way these people talk to others.

Jenny I apologise for the stupid furore over a perfectly acceptable website.

I'm going to give this thread a rest.

[jon404]

DigitalPhaser's note about using as much live text as possible ... DEFINITELY for the <h1> tags... is so important re the search engines and page rankings. Also, in your metadata area, what you put in the <title> and <description> tags ... keep the <description> text to 160 characters or less. Free Google Webmaster has a great short PDF with tips about seach engine stuff.

Could have used Acorn's tip about layering live text over image-text a few months ago, never thought about it. Great idea. Instead, I kept my <h1> headlines (searchable), but put them below bitmaps with text (unsearchable). See http://concourscoaches.com ... where I had the luxury of a customer who doesn't need a mobile variant ... but your site does, particularly if I'm out homehunting with my smartphone.

[Jenny1]

digitalphaser, you are not a troll.
I appreciate the interest you are taking in helping others.

Acorn

WoW, awesome! Boy-o-Boy do I have a lot to learn.
Kind words are every bit as appreciated as strict criticism.
This is my first commercial website, so I am very open to instruction. I understand that I know very little.

Actually, I believe that you are all correct, and I sincerely appreciate all of your replies, and it's the most traffic that the website has ever gotten.

This all started when I showed the website to my friend, who is the boss of an outsourcing company. He is in the business of employing Filipinos for low pay to make websites, do telemarketing, write search engine optimization code, and things like that to put Americans and Europeans out-of-work.

He looked at the website and thought that it looked great and presented very well, then as a favor to me, offered to have one of his professional (low-paid Filipino) web-designers look at it to give me some tips on how to improve things, which resulted in the list that started this thread.

It was a great way to start this awesome discussion and believe me, this presents a steep learning challenge for me because of the specific, on-point instructions and advice that you all were so kind to give me. Xara makes things too easy for me. It's like a toy. I'm a visual artist who is now facing a technical challenge of making things work better.

Thanks again -- Jenny

[jon404]

I think, re your friend with the outsourcing company, that he should be ashamed of himself. If our daily struggles to keep feeding our families were a war, he would be a traitor.

Glad that you are a visual artist! Xara products are a real joy... it is simply amazing to me how fast we can make beautiful websites without having to know any code. A dream come true.

Jenny, if you are in the US or Europe, go to my http://jon404.com and download the free PDF book, Drawing For Money. I wrote it specifically to help graphic artists make a very good income ... and learn how to avoid being offshored. And one last thing -- my stepson in Hollywood tells me we are now 'Content Designers', their latest hot buzzword ... which I like very much, as we can go from writing ad or web text to making illustrations to taking photos without having to invent different job titles. Very fine!

[Jenny1]

I think, re your friend with the outsourcing company, that he should be ashamed of himself. If our daily struggles to keep feeding our families were a war, he would be a traitor.

Yes, well, I'm an American living in a 3rd world enterprise-zone and my roots are in the American Rustbelt, so, "out-sourcing" and "off-shoring" has been the story of my life. I'm not personally in that business but many of the people that I know seem to be.

All-in-all I can see things from both sides. I like to think of us as brothers and sisters who are all trying to feed ourselves and our families no matter where in the world that we are or what race or nationality that we are.

In the end, we can look at this thread and see that the best work, knowledge, and instructions comes from the people here in this community, and not from the low-paid, third-world, website dude