Opinions on my website

TinCool

Over the past number of months I've been plugging away on my own little website - http://www.zuzadi.com/ - to help promote myself locally (I live in UK) in my home town of Worcester as a website/application developer.

This is just a little side thing I am trying to get off the ground to get a little extra cash over and above my full time job. It's not a website that I would use to say get business from random visitors, but rather a placeholder for word of mouth business that I can point people to. I have gotten some business cards printed up for that. The first project I worked on, a scheduling app, was gotten from word of mouth.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions you may have.

aido179

Looks nice and slick. However I would not have gone for such a dark design. Maybe it's just me, and I know you are using as somewhere to direct people from word of mouth, but I would feel better looking at a brighter site. It just seems a bit pessimistic.

The two side panels kind of distract me from the content of the page, they also take a while to load which changes the feel of the site from page to apge. I'm not a huge fan of moving/scrolling panels though.

In my opinion (feel free to disagree) the orange arrows to the left of the text in your menu look really messy. I would align them all to the left, even if your text stays on the right.

Lastly, personally I don't like white text on a black background. Sometimes a css grey blur i think makes them easier on the eye. That or slightly grey text.

On the whole it is a very professional looking site. Congratulations. Probably a lot more professional looking than anything I could have done.

tricky D

The colour scheme is more suited to somethting like gaming more than professional web design/app dev.

The homepage copy is poor wrt sales/marketing orientation and too long and verbose.

aido is right about the lhs nav, make it all left aligned, easier for the eye to catch the start of lines unlike right aligned.

SEO needs a lot of work. Why put images in headings? No descriptions, little or no work on keywords and phrases.

Don't use height and width in the img tags to resize images. Make the images their actual display size.

Why are using tables for layout?

Web Quote page looks bare when first loaded to the extent that it doesn't look right or something's missing. Either provide a default option fully display or greyed out if you want to be 'fancy'.

What currency are the prices in?

Pricing model seems a bit too simplistic, especially when you are offering unlimited redesign attempts which is just plain business madness.

What happens next in the process after a quote is given?

There's a bug somewhere in the quote script. Some combo I just did made the 2nd to last fields disappear. Not sure what the combo was/can't replicate it.

Giving out the GA stuff for your own site for demo purposes isn't what I'd do at all. I'd create a dummy site for that.

Why javascript to submit the contact form, why not a regular submit?

No postal address to foster trust.

No 404 page.

The css is very bloated and inefficient. It has hundreds of unused selectors and uses ids when classes would be much better.

Just one portfolio item with no design item(s). You also provide a link (slow) to the app but no demo UID/Password so it is a wasted opportunity to show off the app.


Unlike aido, this site says nothing professional to me.

hth/gl

donalg1

I do like the look of the site and its layout however when I did find myself almost squinting to read some of the text as its very dark in places and hard to differentiate between some of the colours, personally I would have included a little more white or lighter colours behind the text to make it easier to read.

I am in no way an expert on the subject but thats just my two cents, I will leave the more technical details to the experts all around a nice site though.

TinCool

Thanks all for the feedback. There is definitely some food for thought.

I plan to do the following.

1. Remove the "orange arrows" from the nav panel and left justify the text.
2. Probably anchor the left right scroll panels once they have settled in to their initial positions.
3. Remove the height, width attributes from the various images and save versions that are of the correct size.
4. Obvious omission of currency on the web quote page. Will need to add this.
5. I have replicated the bug on the quote page, will need to fix and display a full version of the quote grid initially.
6. Create a 404 redirect page.
7. Add postal address to footer.
8. Agreed, the CSS is very bloated and does need cleaning up. Will need to look at this a bit more.
9. Remove link to the live Scheduling App on the Portfolio page until I have time to upload/configure a demo version.

We all have opinions on these things. I have spent many many evenings working on this. There is a lot of behind the scenes work done with the database and server side code which is not obvious. Yes I agree the website is dark but that is the theme I have gone for. I will look at modifying the white text by either graying it a bit or introducing a slightly brighter background.

Well I have plenty to be getting on with.

Creamy Goodness

* the bullet points on the side menu can stay but they should align up, looks awful otherwise.
* no favicon.
* make the skype, gtalk icons hyperlinks as well we don't all have laser guided mouse control .
* the hover effect on external links/latest blogs posts also needs to go.
* dropbox referral link? seriously?
* the links to forums as well is a bad idea, you're trying to sell to people who lets be frank 9 times out of 10 won't have a clue what they are doing, they'll click these links, see some bad language or the informal nature of forums and think this content is yours. you have no say in the matter because at this stage they have already left along with any potential business.

TinCool

I've made the following amendments.

• I've removed the bullet points on the navigation menu and left justified the items.
• Removed the hover over effects and returned the opacity back to 1. It makes the website far easier to read. Not sure what I was thinking by adding those effects.
• I do have a favicon made, will need to upload this.
• Added a 404 page.
• Added currency to Web Quote page and fixed bug that was occurring.
• Removed the dropbox referral link.
• Added gray backgrounds to content to make it easier to read.
• Added postal address to footer.

Creamy Goodness, I take on board your point of having various links to blog posts and the blog itself. I'll consider this.

Creamy Goodness

TinCool wrote: »

I've made the following amendments.

• I've removed the bullet points on the navigation menu and left justified the items.
• Removed the hover over effects and returned the opacity back to 1. It makes the website far easier to read. Not sure what I was thinking by adding those effects.
• I do have a favicon made, will need to upload this.
• Added a 404 page.
• Added currency to Web Quote page and fixed bug that was occurring.
• Removed the dropbox referral link.
• Added gray backgrounds to content to make it easier to read.
• Added postal address to footer.

Creamy Goodness, I take on board your point of having various links to blog posts and the blog itself. I'll consider this.

Site looks a lot better now, it's amazing what a few changes can do.

"I've removed the bullet points on the navigation menu and left justified the items."

You should really left align these so that they line up with the left hand side of the image and the contact details, but this is just me, i'm no designer just a developer .

The blog links can stay, just ones to forums i think are a little dodge.

TinCool

Creamy Goodness wrote: »

Site looks a lot better now, it's amazing what a few changes can do.

"I've removed the bullet points on the navigation menu and left justified the items."

You should really left align these so that they line up with the left hand side of the image and the contact details, but this is just me, i'm no designer just a developer .

The blog links can stay, just ones to forums i think are a little dodge.

Agreed. I'll sort that when I get an opportunity. Like you, I'm a Developer first, then designer a far distant second. I designed the look/feel of the website off of my own back, with the initial use of a css template I found which is now far removed from what it was originally.

Ah, are you referring to the links to various sites in the External section that point to other blog websites rather than to Zuzadis own blog ?

Creamy Goodness

TinCool wrote: »

Agreed. I'll sort that when I get an opportunity. Like you, I'm a Developer first, then designer a far distant second. I designed the look/feel of the website off of my own back, with the initial use of a css template I found which is now far removed from what it was originally.

Ah, are you referring to the links to various sites in the External section that point to other blog websites rather than to Zuzadis own blog ?

yup the likes of android forum and asp.net forum.