Site Review

mmurf100

Hi Guys

Can you please review this site for me and let me know your opinions.

The site is yhorizon.ie

I think it is very good but would like your opinions.

Michael

Liam Byrne

Initial impression is good, but it depends on what stage it's at. Given the placeholder text, it's not "live" yet, and at first glance it still needs an awful lot of work!

Is it your own site ?

Without sounding overly-critical, here's what I've found via a quick look:

Sub-pages are all over the shop in Google Chrome - overlapping text, misaligned images, no navigation, dark grey text on dark navy background

No titles, descriptions or keywords on pages
Home page navigation is in Flash (bye-bye SEO) with annoying click sound when you roll over
Spinning globe must be crucifying browser resources because the rollovers, etc, slow down something awful once it loads
No alt or title tags on images
Page filenames are index-2.html and index-3.html

Hope this helps in terms of getting it up and running properly

MrsJohnMurphy

My quick 2c worth of initial impressions ...

The frontpage looks fairly well especially the spinning globe.

However, I dont like the rollover buttons, too blurry, takes too long to change, is flcikery and annoying, and is I feel a bit tacky looking. I also dont like the big blue gap at the very bottom.

mjm

ScumLord

It's a bit of a mess once you leave the homepage. Menu has no text to say where the links go and like Liam said everything is on top of each other making it impossible to make most of it out.

tricky D

Dump the Flash, all of it. 1 - it's too big at >3MB. 2 - it's slowing down the broswer on my decently speced machine to a painfully slow speed taking over 30 seconds just to view source or open a link (that's 29.9 seconds too long). 3 - it's taking up way too much room. 4 - spinning globes became cliched about 10 years ago. 5 - sound on website generally doesn't work. 6 - it does nothing business related and takes up prime real estate which should be used for business related content. Doing business is your prime concern, having pretty stuff is down the list.

Your homepage doesn't tell me anything, especially what business you're in. Instead of the Flash stuff put your logo, navigation, login/search types of functions, then what your business is about in a few lines, then have your best products/offerings and use sales techniques such as FREE OFFERS, SPECIAL OFFERS etc.

One of the pages makes it look like you're doing some sort of directory, but apart from that I haven't much idea what's going on. If it is directory, you'll need a tiered pricing model and free offerings.

Navigation is not really there.

Basically you have a site which you've spent much of the time on making it look nice. Nice doesn't mean sales or doing business well and doesn't focus on making revenue. Concentrate on those first and foremost, and then integrate what's needed for that with a well designed interface and branding.

Look at the most successful web companies, generally they have the minimum of fancy stuff but lots of functionality and often free stuff, with the revenue generating items wrapped around that or just in the middle for shopping sites. Any design they do have isn't too much beyond the basic branding and the more subtle user interfacing methods.

p

It's hard to review that site, because it's not actually a website.

All it is, is a standard template put online. There's no content, nothing to do on the site, some photos that are low quality and still have the istockphoto watermark on them.

DECEiFER

I have to concur on the part of the process usage. It brings Firefox to a crawl. Optimizing Flash can be a bitch, but it has to be done. You can't have that as it is now, so that's your first major concern to be addressed before the aesthetics.

On the part of the tweening buttons at the top, I'm not too fond of it myself either. A simple highlight will do, nothing more. But I am one to indulge in the "more is more" philosophy from time to time, so everyone's opinion of that will vary.

I do like the color scheme, it's not what I'd use, but I like it. Cliché or not, I love the 3D transparent globe. If they had it 10 years ago, it wouldn't have looked as smooth. I'm sure you're still constructing it, so I'm not going to comment on the mess found outside of the homepage.

Keep at it, but you're not doing too badly at all.

Eoin

I'm probably repeating what others have said, but there's no need for a flash top menu. There's way too much going on. Every time I go back to the home page, I have to wait for the thing to finish its animation before I can click on another link. It's also slowed down firefox for me.

The spinning globe thing looks nice, but takes up way too much space. Having an animated image behind text you're trying to read is a bit annoying. It is actually nice looking, but just not appropriate here.

This page is all over the place; massive banner and text overlapping etc - http://www.yhorizon.ie/index-4.html

yop

Agree with the flash and also as said its not completed only a template so its hard to review it bar the first page.

When click on Home it still drops the ABOUT tab down? So HOME is redundant, much too much spinning on the tabs.

Site is too dark, depress the dogs so need to up the color content maybe a bit.

Image quality is very dull also.

None of the other pages seem to display anything, the CONTACT page is all mixed up, there is some info there and an email address but I can't read it.
Also the flash doesnt work on any other page bar the main page.

Not been critical Michael but if you think this is "very good", you might need to go back to the drawing board.