Designign new website

[janobar]

Here I come again… please have a look at this web site http://www.immitel.com which is my latest creation and tell me what you think. Cheers

[Doc C]

Colors are eyecatching, easy navigation. You might want to work on those long sentences on the homepage and repeating yourself in Exploring New Ideas and Sales.

And what's up with sneaking an email link in the copyright after the word webmaster?

[Kitchensink108]

Gah. The design itself was really good so I was all prepared, as always, to view the source and say "your code is horrible!" But noooooo, the code is good, too.

The biggest thing, I'd say, is there's no reason to have the nav menu be flash-based. It would be much more user-friendly to just use images and CSS.

Here's what the site looks like to me: http://kyle.barr.name/files/ii.jpg
(don't worry, there's actually no horizontal scrolling and the banner/nav *does* show up, the Firefox extension that took the screenshot just couldn't see it).
The point of the screenshot is to point out how the content boxes are overlapping the right-side text. It doesn't do this on any other page. On Products and Links, though, the right-side text is right against the content boxes (which doesn't look as good as having some space between the two).

Hmm. The only other thing I can come up with is that your favicon has a white background, whereas it might be more fitting to have a red background like home homepage. Extreme nitpicking, but whatever.

Nice site.

[YvetteKuhns]

The website is attractive mostly to a certain age group or target audience. But it also looks common in design and photos. At first glance, I thought it was another web hosting company website! They are all looking similar to me, but I see so many websites each day. Images add color and can often enhance the presentation, but not always.

I think the personal touch idea was trying to be presented with so many images of people, but when these people appear on other websites, the opposite idea happens. A few school mates and I had a laugh on some television commercials that showed the same actors in a competing school's commercial! That is what came to mind for me.

The color scheme doesn't feel right for this website. The dark background with small white text is difficult to read for older or visually-impaired readers. The Flash navigation may not work for those who do not have Flash installed or enabled. Though there are text links below, visitors (using 800x600) must scroll to the bottom to find them.

Also, there are different forms of color blindness. Some cannot distinguish red/yellow/orange while others cannot distinguish blue/green. While there is shadowing, so much of the same color may not be attractive or have enough contrast for color blind visitors to notice links. And the color scheme changes to match each link, which is confusing to normal viewers but may be helpful to the color blind.

The background image has a pattern. I know I keep mentioning this in reviews, but my eyes go right to the pattern and away from the main page contents. And the dark color is a great place to rest my eyes from the overwhelmingly bright orange and other bright colors. I probably spent more time designing for people with impairments to reach a more general target audience, so I notice these things more.

Overall, the design is simple and fairly easy to read and navigate for someone in my age group (between 20 and 45). If I would ask my husband to read it, he would probably need to highlight the text and even enlarge it. Of course, he probably wouldn't know how to do that, but I could do that for him. You know who your target audience is, so you can decide if you want to adjust your color scheme and navigation to reach more people.

The logo is nice, but it should not change colors! Your color scheme is often part of your brand recognition. My website has blue and white which is also the color scheme of Penn State (my state's college football team). That was not my reason for choosing such colors, but that certainly helps!

I am just being picky. I personally thought it was okay, though I would like to see something more unique to make it stand out from all of the other websites on the Internet. There are so many. Good luck!

[janobar]

Thanks for all suggestions and advice guys. To be honest it was my intention to produce a design with a lot of smiling faces and bright colors. You are probably right that this design is not too friendly for some handicapped people and I admit I didn’t take them into account.

The flash navigation was a natural choice for me as I am in a process of learning flash and use it whenever I can despite some disadvantages coming with it.

Your are right about repeating text although it was supplied by my client I should have made some suggestions regarding to that.

Once again thank you all.

[TheFilmGod]

Nice Site.

There are a few problems with the site. First, WAY too many colors. It hurts my eyes, its like a rainbow! The flash on the logo is annoying after navigating through a few pages. Too many people on each page. At first it looks interesting, but then very annoying. Try to decrease the number of photos you have.

In the services page, you can see how amateur your images are. YOU need to take the woman picture (who is holding the services index card) and shave of that green glow on her hair - from the green screening technique.

Again, these are very small detials. In general your stie is awesome. Good job.

[doothemath]

Is it just me or does anyone else have trouble when clicking on the home page tab from the services page?

[Doc C]

I have the same problem, doothemath. janobar needs to edit his code and change the link there from http://www.immitel.com/%20index.php to http://www.immitel.com/index.php. That should fix the problem

[Neat Pete]

Flash navigation?? Why??? I can't see a thing past the main screen.

I have just upgraded from Firefox 1.5 to 2.0. version 2 turns all your plugins off, including flash and pdf files. Just in case they don't quite work correctly.

I tried to download the new plug in. (I need it to see the occasional YouTube movie) Firefox does not tell you the size of the download. Eventually my line dropped out, and I still have no flash.

So all I can see is the main page. Last year's calendar is jarring. It looks like a glossy brochure. There is too much text for casual surfers to be bothered reading it. The left and right justified text does not work well without a decent hyphenating programme. Phrases like "Are you ready to join the excitement?" are the opposite to how I live. The sentence that begins "With annualised growth and sales.." does not say anything useful or has some words missing.

The pictures look like posed models or stock photos - there is a lot of debate about what sort of people pictures to use on web sites, I veer a bit towards using real people. Call centre pictures are the worst, pretty blondes in nice clothes. The reality is outsourced overseas, people packed in like sardines and driven to keep working by computerised queueing machines.

Great design, looks great.

Neat Pete.