# Critique my website! (please)



## Winchester (Jun 29, 2008)

Hello everyone.

I have been working on a website. It's not as "visually appealling" as I want it to be, but that will come with time. I guess.

I'm trying to get something up there to attract customers.

Any suggestions would be very welcome. :thumbup:

www.winchesterconstruction.ca


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## BrianHay (Jun 17, 2007)

I think it looks great so far and is easy to navigate.

I see you are using the gallery2 software. Great stuff eh! I use it in my forums and without doing anything to it it's the most indexed part of my domain. If I could make one suggestion it would be to point out to people that if they click on a thumbnail for a project it will show that whole album. Some may not realize those are thumbnails for an album. A good place for that could be were it says "this is the main page of your gallery"


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## rbsremodeling (Nov 12, 2007)

Not really feeling the black background. It looks to gloomy. The landing page is kinda plain the picture seems out of place. The whole website seems kinda plain looking

Nice logo though


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## Vince_B (May 9, 2008)

I agree with RBS. Change the background color and give people something to look at on the landing page. I think if you do those two things, you'll have a good site you can build on.


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## Aiken Colon (Jul 14, 2008)

It loaded pretty slow for me, but most .ca sites do. Maybe it is faster up there. If your looking for google rankings that can really hurt you.

Here are your meta tags on your gallery page
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="" />
<meta name="description" content="Click on an image to see the Album." />

You need to set those up, right now you have none.

Your title bar for the same page is "Gallery - Windows Internet Explorer", same thing you won't get any hits from that. Make sure your onsite content matches your title bar and meta tag descriptions. At the same time don't duplicate your title bar to your meta description. google webmaster tools will show you pages that have that flaw.

Make sure your alt tags on your pics also match your keywods in your title bar and meta description line.

good use of H1 tags on your services page, but you might want to use the h2 for the lines below the h1, it helps. 

One last SEO bit of advice. Do you think you will get more searches for winchester construction or renovation, construction, carpentry, contracting? I don't know the answer, but you might want to consider flipping those in your services title bar. 

I love your logo, and the font used in it.

JJ



I personally like the black back ground, but to each his own.


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## OCRS (Apr 29, 2008)

aikencolon said:


> It loaded pretty slow for me, but most .ca sites do. Maybe it is faster up there.


Slow up here as well. 
More content on home page would be better.


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## Winchester (Jun 29, 2008)

aikencolon said:


> It loaded pretty slow for me, but most .ca sites do. Maybe it is faster up there. If your looking for google rankings that can really hurt you.


 Yeah, it even loads slow for me. I think maybe it's the server? I'll try changing it in the next couple of months unless I figure out how to solve the problem otherwise.

Thank you for all your tips, all of you. I'm trying to fix some stuff and polish the page a bit. I still need to fix all the things you brought up about the gallery. And I guess changing the title would work well for improving "googility" (sorry, made that up).

So

 Landing page needs a lot more and good content
Need to optimize meta-tags
Need to optimize everything in the gallery


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## Hammer_Nail (Jun 16, 2008)

*Cool*

It has a nice look, and feel. BTW, who made the Logo? I like that allot.:thumbup:


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## MGSProperties (Mar 27, 2008)

not sure why but it is a little slow


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## asnider (Jul 10, 2008)

Also slow for me...can't see why though, I'm guessing it's your server. I've been involved in web design for a long time and a big rule of thumb is to never use light text on dark backgrounds. You always want your background to be light and your text to be dark.....easier on the eyes. I do like how you have it centered in the browser window and you're header with logo are fantastic!

It looks great....you might look into using some javascript functions to fade your images in and out so it has a slideshow feel, instead of a bunch of image blocks.


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## Aiken Colon (Jul 14, 2008)

We have customers and a business relation we deal with in Canada. All their sites are .ca and all load super slow. 

The business relation we have up there is a huge shopping engine. They have a very nice infastructure, and it is still super slow. 

JJ


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## Winchester (Jun 29, 2008)

I guess I should consider getting a different domain, then.

Thanks for all the comments 

About the dark background, light text thing: My new company truck is black, my shirts with logo are black and I'd like to stay consistent. Honestly, there is not that much reading to do on my site, it is monstly just a way for potential customers to see what we can do and have done, and to reflect a professional appearance. I believe this is well on the way to that goal arty:

I did the logo and website myself. The house with the saw is a piece of black and white clipart I got from a clipart website with permission from the website owner. I then just made it fit with the desired colours in photoshop


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## George Z (Dec 23, 2004)

> I guess I should consider getting a different domain, then.



Don't even think about it.
Most Canadians *(by far)* use google.ca not google.com.
Everything being equal, 
Google will have the .ca higher than the .com in Canada.

How slow is http://bell.ca/home/


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## kirbymurphy (Jun 5, 2008)

fungku said:


> Hello everyone.
> 
> I have been working on a website. It's not as "visually appealling" as I want it to be, but that will come with time. I guess.
> 
> ...


I usually hate white type on a black background, but since you don't have a lot of type, it looks good. Frame the photo on the Home page like you did the others.

Same critique on the Projects page as other said about the Gallery page. There are more photos "under" the vet pix, but many will never know they are there.

When I go to the gallery page, you loose the feel of the rest of the site. I suppose that's a bit of software you used for the Gallery function? Try to match the white on black style. Again. "Click for more pix".

Setting your table width to 780 wastes a lot of real estate you could be using. (A lot on my 1900 pix monitor) Most common size is now 1024 x 768. You can use auto-sizing with percents instead of hard numbers, but I haven't mastered that yet.:blink:

Biggest thing is the style shock going to the Gallery page and the fact you loose the Nav Bar at the top of the page. The Sidebar is also a hidden feature. Looks like it might be a good function to promote.

Nice job!:clap:


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## Hammer_Nail (Jun 16, 2008)

*Add Content*

Looks good, needs more Content (written stuff) with Keywords for SEO. :clap:


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## BuiltByMAC (Mar 11, 2006)

Maybe I'm missing something but on your gallery page, your first project "Renovation 110 Ave" I found 10 pics - all of 'em said "Before" in their title. Couldn't find any that said "After" - don't know what you did on that renovation...

With "Before" and "After" pics, I'd place them next to each other - and put the "After" pic first. That's what you want people to see - your work. They can refer back to the "Before" pic to see what you had to work with but your focus and what should be in the forefront should be the "After" pics...

Mac


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## asnider (Jul 10, 2008)

wow you did the logo yourself! that's pretty impressive....if construction doesn't work for you, at least you have other options! how did you do the subtle reflection at the bottom of your logo, that's pretty cool.


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## stevensmth89 (Jul 21, 2008)

Try to make the site easy to navigate and add a lot of useful features and searching tools including a site map. Your goal should be to make the site look very simple to use, however, it should contain useful features as i said before.


Hope i was helpful,
John


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## Michael46 (Jun 12, 2008)

*Remove email address*

Any web site with [email protected] is a target for email harvesting software bots. 

Use a button (send me a email) or leave off the @


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## The_Game (Jun 8, 2008)

here my email address: if you write this way you wont get bombarded with junk mail:

dan-at-ftellc-dot-com:clap:


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