Website up and Ready to Rock!

[empress_effects]

Hi,

Please critique my site at www.empresseffects.com. It's hosted by Powweb. Thanks for any input.

Steve.

[Marko Peric]

The site is functional and loads fast, but it's not visually appealing. The mostly black text, buttons and logo and the grey background are a little dull. The red links are a bit too jarring on the grey background, and when I clicked on the Pedals button the red ABY Switcher picture was so bright it almost hurt my eyes.
The site seems solid, if not 100% complete. The index page could do with some explanation of what the site is about, since all it has now is the latest item of news and the same top logo and sidebar as the rest of the site. You need the first page people read to grab them, not puzzle them.
The fact the the sidebar buttons all have different rollover colours is interesting. It gives a little bit of colour, at least during mouseover. I see you went with javascript for that, I might have gone with CSS for that, but that would be a lot more work to have the multiple colours.

Not bad, though, but it needs a bit more visual appeal.

[empress_effects]

Thanks for the suggestions guys,

I've added the doctype and put in the alt tags for the images.

As for Marko's comments, I made that crazy picture a little less intense (although the colour of the pedal is pretty intense!), and I changed the link colours so they're a little less jarring. I added a front page that explains the site a bit, I'll add a bit more to it when I think of something.

As for the boringness of the site, I guess I'll just have to spice it up with content. I'm almost finished some custom work, so I'm going to put up pictures of that. And I'm also going to get some high-quality video up of people actually using my products on stage. Hopefully that will do it. Maybe I'll just put tons of blinking text and animated gifs all over the place. :-)

If you can think of anything else, please tell me. Your comments so far have been very helpful.

Thanks,
Steve.

[Marko Peric]

That's a definite step in the right direction. Another easy to impliment suggestion is to make your logo at the top link to the index page.

[empress_effects]

Hi again guys,

Thanks very much for the additional comments. I agree with all of them. I guess the hardest part for me, since I'm so immersed in the business, is knowing what a first time viewer would need to see in order to know what exactly empresseffects.com is all about. I added "Audio Products" each of the titles, changed the site to php based so I could use 'includes' to add the menu. put up a picture of the aby switcher in the menu so it shows up on each page.

Thanks again for all your help, any more suggestions would be appreciated.

Steve.

[Marko Peric]

I like the pedal on the right side of the page. It was wasted space before, now it can showcase your products. And php, well, is so hot right now. I know on my own site I have been naming all my pages with .php extensions even though I don't use php on many of them, just in case in the future I start using more.