dannywebdesign

Hi BVH thanks for the feedback. Yes I agree with you on the colours, they have to have the blue bits though as it matches all their literature, but the grey pages probably need brightening up. One thing to note though, don't know whether it's related, their marketing department push out special offer type emails to the registered users and apparently when they tried to use colourful email templates they had very little response, but the more duller grey ones seemed to work really well. I'm not really a marketing guru so would be interesting to get an opinion from someone who is I suppose

Hi Jon, I think your own feedback pretty much sums it up well, flash websites usually look nice but lack in SEO, I expect your company is going to want top rankings in the search engines to attract more customers. With regards to the design, some of the imagery (if that's a word) looks a bit suspicious on my PC, I was squinting to read the white text on orange backgrounds present on the thumbnail shots of the cars, also that Lexus RX400h is so fast I can't even see it in the picture, just shows the side of a building! The meshy background effect also seems to be a bit to harsh for me, some of the text at the bottom of the page (in the links) again needing to squint to read it. Also browsing through the social events page, there are links there which just state "image coming soon" is it supposed to be live now? Might suggest some sort of call to action there as well, visitors viewing the events may want to make contact with you to either book themselves onto an event or become a member. Your contact details are also not very obvious, seems a bit hidden down in the bottom left, maybe a phone number/email address in the top right?

Hi All, Obviously this is within a specific industry but could you provide some critical feedback please? There are in fact two websites here (corporate and shopping) the client is very happy with the corporate site so I wanted to keep the theme similar for the shopping site, however I have been developing the shop site over time whilst analysing the way customers use it, there always seems to be something to tweak. Could you provide some feedback on the layout, graphics, usability etc... Capital Cooling Shopping Site Thank you Danny

Most of the time the graphical design of a website will need to match the clients already produced leaflets/pamphletes etc.. you have to keep them happy at the end of the day. As already pointed out though, use Headings, also try positioning the images amoungst the text (aligned left or right) rather than centering in between paragraphs. Did you design the logo? Apart from that it's lekker! (my attempt at SA slang)

Ah yes I see what you mean, looks much better!

Hi Pedro, I'm a bit rubbish with fonts, is serif similiar to time news roman? (with trailing bits on the letters?) If so yes that may fit better than Arial, I'll have to talk to the client see what they think. Thanks for the feedback, your tattoo site looks very good by the way

Hello everyone, Can you please have a look at this site and give me some feedback? Litu Scottish Wedding Planners Lots of Pictures and Text, is it too much or do you think it helps people make a decision to use them? Thank you Danny

Hi Zigpres, that was an interesting read and makes a lot of sense. The original script for this site just looked a real mess with bits of bolded out text all over the place, the point of the website is to look classical, be easy to read etc... so I like the idea of using a class to "unbold" the text, think I might try that.

Hi Tery, Thanks for the reponse, they are not header tags, just the odd word made bold in the text. I think I read somewhere about bold and italic text being "more important" and so good for SEO, however not sure if that's a bit out-of-date now and as you say makes no difference. I don't have an example to show you just yet, the text has been sent to me from the previous designer and I havn't uploaded to internet yet Thanks again

Hi All, Just a quick question, I have just took over the re-design of a scottish wedding planner site, the previous designer went on an SEO spree and put bold text all over the place. The client doesn't want to change the wording, but the bold bits (everytime the word "wedding" or "scottish" comes up) just looks messy. The question is, does bold text really make any difference? I would rather ditch the bold stuff, but concentrate the SEO on everything else (titles, desciptions, alt text etc...) Thanks in advance for any comments

Yes a few others picked up the pricing, not easy enough to find (as you just discovered). I'm a bit confused by the pricing myself, he keeps copying everyone elses from different websites so it' no surprise some things look cheap and others look expensive. Not sure how to advise him otherwise though, I havn't got a clue about photography pricing, I think they make their money printing stuff but not sure what the standard rates are to compare against, plus I don't want to tell him his pricing is wrong. All I can do is suggest the prcing is centralised better and maybe say things like "have you ever though about being VAT registered etc".

I think I'm going to stop working with awkward clients! Everyone has provided some great feedback, I think the way forward will be to list some recommendations based on the feedback given. I'm sure I can persuade him to let me change it, I just need to explain things to him face to face. Once I start on a new homepage I will get it posted here for review.

Hi mate Thanks for the advice, I will give that a try

Hi Emmi, thanks for having a look and providing some feedback. My client has actually only done a couple of weddings so I think he's going to struggle a bit anyway, in fact I think it's only two he's done. He wants to target the other areas also (he's just recently had an idea to add "school proms" on the site) but he tells me that weddings makes the most money (but then you probably already know that! ha ha) Anyway I will consider your thoughts very carefully, hopefully I can get a re-design done soon so will re-post once I get the go ahead from him.

Hi Andy, thanks for the advice about the url, fair point. I see what you mean about that other photography site, but surely it should be black and white? No seriously the general idea will be to focus more on the images in a re-design I think (the decent ones), but I will need to keep some text in there somewhere for SEO, maybe if the imagery is front and center, much bigger, with the text underneath might work. I will have to knock something up and re-post it here to get some more opinions I think. Thanks again for taking the time to provide feedback

I like the sound of going with him on a photo shoot. I must admit whilst I don't want to "disrespect" my own client, I'm not a huge fan of the photos compared to other photographers in the same area, some of them are ok but quite a few look to me like everyday phots anyone would take with a digital camera (such as the highland games and RAF airshow pictures). Maybe if I go with him I can take a few snaps on the iPhone and put them on the website instead. No I shouldn't have said that I feel a bit guilty now. What I may do though is ask him to pick his best photos as I think it the site needs trimming down a bit. Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback

Ha ha I know exactly what you mean! my client actually asked me to replicate a pricing page he saw on someone elses site, litterly "can you just copy and paste all of that information and put it in my site" Maybe we should learn from this and make up one big website template for our own sites, including pricing!

Ah yes the text on the images! wondered when that would be picked up! You may not have noticed but all the galleries are being slowing updated with "text in images", he has been slowly going through each gallery and sending me new images, complete with built in text, which I've tried to stop him doing but he insists "it looks better". I didn't expect the actual photos to be picked up for being small though, I tried to layout the pages so that you can always see a complete photo at the top of the page next to the text, without having to scroll down. The thumbnails are then also right next to the images so you can click between them and see each picture without having to scroll. Also the photos come in a variety of rectangular shapes and sizes and so I have tried to account for that, again keeping them all at the top of the page (this is based on a 1024 x 768 screen resulution which seems to be the most common now in the UK). But anyway it's a fair comment so I will give it some thought. More to the point, how do I stop him sending me images with the text in!

Hi kree80r, yes I also hate the underlined headings and the colour scheme. Thanks for the feedback, just need to persuade the photographer it needs changing now!

Hi yes I see what you mean about the text in the 3rd person, based on him not wanting to change the text, I persuaded him to start using a blog so that users would see a more personal side, I did this for another photographer and it seem sot work very well. However I will press him further to allow me to update the text. Like the idea of the photo to

Hi Andy, Thanks for the feedback, completely agree with everything you say. The blurrey image...ha ha I actually sneaked that one in to give it some colour as the black and white was despressing me too much! I see what you mean about the home page animation, might have to change that and I will have a look at the vertical menu. Thanks again

Hi All, This photography website is only a couple of months old, but it's managing to get quite a bit of traffic from google searches with people scanning through the galleries and service pages. However no-one seems to be making any enquiries, can you have a look and let me know if anything seems obviously wrong? The main area this guy is interested in is wedding photography, would anyone book him based on the website? Photography Website One other thing, he has had a lot of input on the design of the site, it has to be black and white with all headings underlined. Thanks in advance, be as critical as you like!

Hi Mate Thanks for the reply, I remember trying that .htaccess file method once before but I don't think my shared hosting account allows it. I will try the 301 redirect though. Thanks again

Hi Andy Looks like a plan, I'll give it a try, thanks mate

Hi All, I am completely rebuilding a website for a Scottish Wedding Planning Agency. Their current site has a very poor navigation structure and so part of the re-design will be to update the navigation. The problem I am trying to pre-empt is this: The site is 5 years old and currently ranks very well in Google, Yahoo etc... But this is based on the current pages being indexed. If I come along with a completely new site (granted it's using the same domain name and has most of the same keywords within the text) will it not completely disappear from google once it realises the original pages don't exist anymore? Also I need to implement php everywhere, so all the pages will be .php ending instead of .htm I know I need to create a sitemap, which in turn will update the search engines with the location of the new pages, what happens when they find the new pages, will the site return to it's top (well almost) position? I'm also imagining there will be lots of 404 not found errors from users clicking on search results which lead to pages no longer there or renamed. Any advice please?