Hi all,

 

I'm hoping some of you might be kind enough to give me your opinion on something. I recently redesigned this website http://www.surreypcsupport.com . Yeah, I know the inner pages are a little plain but really it's the home page I'm asking about. I made a post on another forum I use and the feedback was good and bad. One poster suggested that duo-tone (only two colours) was too plain for a sales page and that I should add some more colour. Question is, which colour? Anything bright will look a little out of place in my opinion. What do you think?

 

Another poster said it looked like I'd downloaded a template and changed it for my purposes. Trust me, I never use templates (they are rarely W3C compliant) and this is all my own work. Do you think it looks like a template?

 

I'm not looking for feedback on the technical quality of the site, just the look and feel.

 

Any comments are welcomed, good or bad so thanks in advance.

i would make the text for the areas you cover at the bottom, a different colour other than black, some search engines might think you trying to rank higher by using black hat SEO techniques. other than that its looks ok.

i would make the text for the areas you cover at the bottom, a different colour other than black, some search engines might think you trying to rank higher by using black hat SEO techniques. other than that its looks ok.

 

The text isn't black it's just hidden unless the user places their mouse over the link that says "towns in our area". I wanted to do it like that because the list of towns at the bottom would spoil the look of the page.

 

Thanks for the feedback though. I did consider the risk of it being viewed as black hat but my belief is that because the text is displayed by a common user action it should be OK from Google's viewpoint.

Here are a few suggestions:

- I'd get rid of the flash banner; I really dislike it when things are moving on the screen because it distracts me when I'm trying to read other things. Those images could stay I guess, but the flying words should go

- I'd also have a simpler background - maybe a gradient that goes from top to bottom? or a dark grey background

 

Other than that, it looks good. If you want more colour, you could have the words up top in different colours ("it support", "web design"...). Or when you hover over the links up top, they could be a bright green or something. Some subtle hints of colour like that.

Thanks very much for all the comments so far. All very valid points and when I have time I will definately make some changes and experiment with some completely new ideas.

 

I must say I'm very impressed with this forum, the quality of comments and the busy-ness of it.