Website Critique Needed

[aldrich4k]

I have been working on a website for a small company that builds racecar chassis. The website address is http://www.lightningchassis.com. Currently, their biggest competitor is http://www.bobpierceracecars.com/, and I would love to beat their website traffic!

The website needs to be somewhat simple and have fairly easy navigation, as not all viewers are completely comfortable with computers. I know the site still needs some work, and I would appreciate anyone's unbiased opinions and suggestions for improvements.

This website is hosted with PowWeb. I primarily used FrontPage to create this website, but also edit in straight HTML. I also have DreamWeave but have not used it extensivly for this site.

Thank you for all of your help; it is greatly appreciated.

[YvetteKuhns]

Ditch FrontPage and try Dreamweaver if you have to use an editor. The website is currently using frames. If you view the source code of the index (home) page, you will see almost nothing of help to search engines. If you want to beat your competitors by relying on search engine ranking and traffic, you must have a search engine friendly website. Even a site map wouldn't help in this case, because the links would only show the main page contents.

Your home page should define your target audience. You must explain who you are, what products or services you offer and to whom. You must explain privacy, payment, shipping, refund policies when selling things. I had to find the contact page just to see that you are in Kentucky. What products and services are available in the United States? Outside of the United States? Do you accept checks, PayPal, credit cards?

The web page contents appear organized, but the website doesn't look professional. Race car drivers spend more money than the average car enthusiasts and may expect nicer websites. The competitor website you mentioned has a sportier color scheme and more exciting website design. It isn't perfect in design, either, as far as search engines are concerned. So, you still have a chance to get better ranking.

Remove that "best viewed in" statement. I am viewing in Firefox and I am not switching to Internet Exploder to view a website unless I have to do so. My mortgage website forces me to do so, because it does not function in Firefox. That is extremely annoying.

Your website does not need to be as cluttered as your competitor's website, but it could use some jazzing up. Try putting your logo at the top of your contents pages and lose the left column entirely. You don't need a links menu on the top AND the left. Put the tag line under the logo and put a picture of a car next to the logo. Put the copyright info at the bottom of each contents page.

Try to get incoming links from car enthusiast or car racing forums, search engines and directories. Exchange links with similar websites. Try to avoid those with free hosting, because they often don't get updated or disappear which will cause bad or broken links for you.

Darn, now you got me missing the old Nova aka the Blue Bomber which was my first car. I also had a black 1972 Nova that was jacked up in the back. I met my husband at a car show, so the cars bring back some memories for me. My old neighbors race cars. We all would drive the trash company crazy by leaving a worn tire by the trash cans every trash day. There is a one-bulk-item rule, so we would all leave a tire next to each trash can on the street to get rid of all those worn tires piled up in our barns/garages. ;)

[Kitchensink108]

Standard warning: I tend to repeat a lot of things Yvette says.

-Don't use frames.
-Don't disable right-click. It doesn't protect anything on your site and is just annoying to users.
-This site may be best viewed in IE, but I'm not going to switch to IE to view it.
-I think you should move the dropdown menus a bit farther down from the links you hover to show them.
-It's hard to tell the difference between the top nav and the left nav. Either put a title or something on them or combine them into one nav.
-Homepage needs some content. A good idea is a synopsis of what the site's about.
-Your homepage image is low quality. There are some imperfections from where it was cut out from the background and overall its edges aren't very smooth.
-Idea: make the boxes in the left column 100% of the column's width.
-Idea: put some left-padding on the left-nav, so it's not right up against the edge.
-The text-size of the top-nav is different on the homepage than the other pages. It should stay the same size. Personally, I think the smaller font size with some top and bottom padding would look good.
-Idea: define the left column from the rest of the page somehow, like a border, different background color, dropshadow, innershadow, or something.

Right now you use a lot of solid, bright blue. It might look better if it was either a bit more graphical or if bright blue wasn't used as much. Not really sure, though.

[YvetteKuhns]

Don't disable right-click. It doesn't protect anything on your site and is just annoying to users.

I didn't say that, because I usually try to stay with the visitor experience approach to a review. And I had to leave something for you to say. ;) I agree that disabling browser functions does more harm than good. Anyone can steal contents if they want to do so. It is easy to disable Javascript if you don't want to print screen or copy files from your computer's temporary Internet files.

Right now you use a lot of solid, bright blue.

That was the FIRST thing I noticed after seeing the vertical scrollbar that showed the stupid frames. Very old-style Front Page look.

[Kitchensink108]

And I had to leave something for you to say. ;)haha, so kind of you. :D