Re: commercial site critique requested

At 05:32 PM 5/22/99 , bobbi ashley wrote:
>Before I go any farther with this design, I thought I would throw it up
>for comments.  I have come to know that the insights from the list are
>worth while and save me a lot of extra work.
>
> http://www.healthtechnologies.com/sigler/

I like the layout of collision.html. But the splash page leaves a lot to be
desired --

	#1: the link, until it is visited, is in the default (blue) color, making
it very hard to read against the background
	#2: the left hand graphic looks like it should be a menu, and it isn't.
Counter-intuitive.
	#3: the roll up effect on that graphic serves no purpose, other than
"because it can be done". Such effects get in the way of the site design,
rather than making it more usable.
	#4: This is directed at others besides you, as well: the phrase "for all
your (insert what the business does here) needs" is one of the worst
crutches a copywriter can get into. It shows no customer benefit and is not
at all descriptive of what the client does. It's worse than useless, in any
kind of advertising copy (I'm a radio copywriter, and that's one of the
biggest, and most feeble crutches many radio ads waste time with, too...).

I would encourage you to dump the splash page entirely, and lay the entire
site out along the lines of collision.html. That page is nice -- you may
want to consider a little more space between the text and the images. With
large fonts, they are kind of crowded. Don't forget the details, too --
like a title for the page, instead of "insert_document_title_here".
Overall, a nice start on that page ;-) The page size, both visually and
file size, is decent. I did not validate or view any source code, but if I
had to guess, I'd say this is MS Publisher layout -- you may want to look
over the code when you're done. Publisher, in my experience, makes code
about 30% heavier than it needs to be....

IE 4.01 (1024x768, large fonts)
Win95
Cable Modem (Server speed is noticeably slow -- I suspect on a dialup modem
it's probably fine.)



Best,
Scott Temaat, CEO
SOHOWeb Technologies, LLC (http://sohoweb.net)

Effective Web Presence Doesn't Cost -- IT PAYS
Toll-Free: 888-421-SOHO

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