New small business site

Yellow, very yellow
Do you really need the links at the top and down the side?
I would remove the side link buttons and add links at the bottom like you have at the top, maybe a little smaller as well.

As for the yellow, its a nice yellow, but is it the color for a cleaning business? when I think of yellow I think of baby pee, or smoke stains ....

you should keep the font all the same throughout, I noticed some pages your using comic sans with bold which gives it a beginners look. May be ok for headers but not whole paragraphs

Some pages like the insurance pages take a little while to load, do you really need to show the certificates? You'd be better off just mentioning the types or polices you have or are covered for, you cant read the pics anyway. as far as i know it could be saying you dont have it, nothing says you do, just says here they are.

Its a business site, is the links page needed? Especially with warning, music starts automatically, thats like saying dont go in there things arent right. maybe at the bottom have "web page by Muncyfamily" as a link so if people are interested they go to a netural site. Id lose, WEBPAGESTHATSUCK link for sure, I know the site, its a good site but you have a picture saying it, people could just browse your pages and not read them (like i did) and come across WEBPAGESTHATSUCK, could look like your site is mentioned in there.

Over all nice site, was actually amazed you could have so much information about a house cleaning business, I take it the business is in USA? I'm on the other side of the world and none of the names rang a bell, looking at the service area page I'd say your in England, but from the index I'd say America.

Good luck with the business, looks like you know what your talking about and will go far.

I haven't gotten a lot of complaints about the yellow, but you're not the first. My experience on the various forums is that no matter who designed the site or what colors they used, some people applaud and some boo and hiss. Not sure what makes the most sense. Site was done in Front Page 2000 (time for the purists to boo). This makes it easy to rough out a good looking site (1 hour for rough copy and 2.5 weeks to current content), but it does limit your flexibility. I was constantly changing the order and names of the page links with simple drags & drops that updated all pages. I'm not a FP expert, but I think you can only get the automatic nav bars (or text) on the top or left and not the bottom.

I'll have to take a close look at the fonts. I only recall ever using "normal" fonts, which means the default style within the Front Page theme I chose (Cactus). It would be interesting if people familiar with FP suggested other possible themes, since I could change the sites look 200% with about 5 mouse clicks. In fact it is easy for anyone to download a page into FP and play for themselves.

I am located in New Jersey. Bedroom communities for many NY city commuters. Of course the map looks like England. With the exception of a few towns with Indian (native American) names, most US towns and cities have UK counterparts. Where are you from Busy? Thanks for the great input.

Not too bad. My first impression is that it's a nice clean looking site, which definitely suits your topic.

The first thing I'm going to complain about is the navigation. First of all, there's no need to have a second horizontal navbar at the top of the page - at the bottom of long pages, fine, but at the top it's not necessary. Secondly, the navbar is too long, both in terms of the space it takes up and the number of options on it. What you should do is divide your navbar into groups of related items and then space them out to give the visual impression of related items being groupd toegether. It'll make it easier for people to use the site.

One thing you might want to do is to try to shorten up your content a bit. Studies have shown that people don't like to read on line - they're more likely to skim. So make it easier for them by using short paragraphs and bulleted lists whenever possible. THe "quality" page, for example, is particularly text-heavy. Some of it also seems to have a rather unprofessional writing style (ie. use of the word "whiner").

I think you've done a good job collection assets, it's simply a matter of organization them in a more professional and formatted style. The first step is to take the advice of the previous reviewers and simplify the navigation, shorten and stylize the copy, and format the site into a column (remember that some people have monitors a lot larger then yours and the site may look oddly formatted to them). I don't mind the yellow. But I think you should defiantly consider adding some tables to condense and organize the site.

I second Adam. Nice looking site but clean it up a bit (pun intended!) Especially the navigation, as Megan says it's too big and just put the links again at the bottom in a much smaller font. Keep the fonts the same & don't use comic sans.

I can agree with most of the other points made. However, I really thought that the site was your typical Frontpage slap together.

Quote: This makes it easy to rough out a good looking site

-----Begin Frontpage Tirade-----

I personally despise Frontpage. I think that it makes for awful web pages. So much overcoding and propietary tags and consideration for only one browser. If you don't want to get your hands down in the code, then at least use something like Dreamweaver. It writes cleaner code and affords much more flexibility.

-----End Frontpage Tirade-----

Any way getting back to the site review.
The List:

• The yellow - the yellow is not too awful bad but I think that it would look much better with a darker background around the edge and then the yellow at about 75-80% of the page. This would make it a bit less weary to the eyes.
• The graphics - that banner at the top is too huge. 600x126 pixels. The logo, phone number and Affordable are all in the same graphic. The graphic should be in at least two possbily three different pieces. The other problem with the graphic is that the text on the 'affordable' part needs to be anti-aliased. I am also not sure why the phone number is so large, while your name is so small and jagged. I would work on improving that.
• Swirls -I also can't say that I liked or understood the little swirls on the left navbar.
• Links - too many links on the home page. There are the two navbars, then about every sentence in your text has a link. When I see a site with this many links I feel that I am being herded so to speak to click on one. Being herded somewhere is what you should strive to achieve but the viewer should not be so aware of this. I think that it would help if you would remove the text underline from your links in the text area.
• index.htm revised 06/03/01 04:40 PM (this is on your homepage and all others)- I am not sure why this is even on your page. I would get rid of it. For one thing, most people wouldn't know what index.htm is. For another, a couple of years from now when your site is very static, people will look at that and think "Man this is old stuff"
• Text color - You have a couple of colors of red text, some green, a little blue. I don't like the colors especially on the yellow background. With the font choice, it makes it look a bit unprofessional.
• Click here to view printable version - Is this suppossed to do something. It didn't for me. Okay it did remove the left navbar. It doesn't work in Netscape.
• The map and directions - I would clean up the graphics on this as it is hard to read. The directions, would be easier to follow as bullet points. Right now they are kind of lumping into a single paragraph.

Anyway it looks like there is a consensus about the navbar. The site was just an okay IMO.

Ok, I guess it's not a finished site. I'm getting some really good quality critiques here that I failed to garner elsewhere. I'm already experimenting with the nav bars.

What is the opinion of stacking the compact text links that are now at the top, down the left side. This is a much narrower border and not very long, so the "many" links can be seen without scrolling. I would change the links at the top to just Previous, Next, and Home. I might also put these three links at the bottom. I could put the arc graphic buttons, that are now on the side, on the top so as not to go completely to text only and lose all the visual impact. Previous & next would run you up and down the link list items which I had already ordered as to relative importance. The load times should also improve.

Also under consideration is adding a right border of equal width to the left, and a bottom border, with copyright info only at the bottom. All three borders would get a darker color to compliment the yellow.

Contrary to what some suspected, everything on all pages, is in a table. With the changes above completed, I should be able to set the table widths to 100% and have them centered (actually 100% is centered by definition).

That giant banner is automatically derived by Front Page based on my master gif (Logo and phone number), with the page name inserted into the derived gif by FP. I'm thinking it isn't much of an advantage. I'll probably go to a simple logo gif and text for the phone number and page title. This should improve the look and also speed load times.

The printable version of the wide "compare" table will probably become the default version with a full set of text links at the top and prev/home/next at the bottom. Front page was set to be compatible with NS & IE >=4.0. I'm not sure what is not working for mairving in NS.

I just outlined a lot of effort, which probably will not give me a payback for my time, but my perfectionist side is coming out. Please give me a lot of feedback on these proposed revisions. Don't say I don't listen, you guys are coming through loud and clear and it is most appreciated!

I don't think that would work for the navigation. What you should do is either make a whole new set of buttons. Either that or use text with some CSS link classes to make them look a little more interesting. Those arc style ones have to go - they're just too big.

Ordering your links according to relative importance... well, that's just your opinion for one, and people probably wouldn't understand it that way. I didn't. You need to arrange them in a way that would make sense to anyone. Some of those labels are a bit misleading too - I wasn't sure what "Compare" and "Gifts" meant before I clicked on them.

Another thing I noticed - on the service area page you've got a button that links to a map, but I could barely read the text on that button so it should really be re-done.

Some NS 6 problems - for some reason the header/logo graphic isn't centering and there's a lot of alignment problems with graphic bullets. You probably don't have to worry about it now, since not too many people are using this browser yet, but you may have to in the future.

Quote: Some NS 6 problems

That is assuming that you can get this browser not to crash. Crashes about every time for me. NS 6 is weird. I just built a site that used a index.cgi to load the site and all the pages. Everything worked fine it NS 4.7, IE, Opera. At the last minute I thought that I would give it a try in NS 6. Well the page wouldn't even load at all in NS 6. Something in the header tag it couldn't digest.

tmuncy, yeah we like to give thorough but constructive reviews here. Hopefully no one gets their feelings hurt but we try above all else to tell the truth with some kindness.

Quote: Front page was set to be compatible with NS & IE >=4.0. I'm not sure what is not working for mairving in NS.

Browser NS 4.7, OS Slackware Linux.

Quote: All three borders would get a darker color to compliment the yellow.

Try this green #336666. It gives a nice look for an outside border.

I've made the navigation changes suggested. The swirls or arcs or whatever are gone. The left side navigation is text and is much more compact vertically and horizontally. There is an empty right border of the same width as the left hand nav border. The top navigation is also text put instead of redundant with the left it is back/home/next browsing from one peer page to the next. Probably should have include a parent or up link for those down two levels or more from home.

Having done all that, I set the width of all the content tables to max that would fit between on an 800 wide display without scrolling. I centered them all, instead of left justifying them, because the phantom right border now gives me a true screen center, instead of being offset to the right by the left border. I was going to set the content table to 100% width, but it is harder to read with a 1024 or 1280 wide display.

The copyright statement is now a bottom border common to all pages. I eliminated the separate printer friendly version of the Compare page and eliminated the left side nav and right side border on that page only, to better accommodate the wide table that is set at 100% in this case only. Finally I put the date the page was updated in an obscure place on each page in a tiny font with low contrast and no label, for my reference only - can you find it?

I haven't worked on the top banner yet, but I'll get there. Framing things with a dark background like 336666 will be a lot more work than I thought. The logo is a fixed obstacle that can't be changed and I need a scheme that accommodates it. I'm sure I'll come up with something or get a good idea from you guys.

I hope most of you find this the improvement you were looking for, but if you don't, I can take it. Let the re-review games begin.

I would put your logo in the upper left corner above the text links - it seems to me that it would fit better.

I would cut down the navigation even more - it's just kind of long.

Brooke

Haven't gotten to the top banner yet, but that's next and that is where I'll put the logo.

I don't think the 'Back, home and Next' suit your site.

on the 'compare' page you only have 'home' and 'next', whats next? I would loose these links or at least use the page name instead of back or next.
The side links look 100% better but still think you need links at the bottom on the longer pages or at least a 'top of page' link.

If you can edit the source code, I'd remove all the extra   at the end of the pages, a fault of FP (one of the many), making the page look longer than it is.

You asked where I was from, I'm from New Zealand

I dislike the fact that your navbar is located so far from your text...Im useing 1024X768 and their must be 400 px between your navigation and your body text.
And again I dislike the yellow. yellow is by nature a stress color and unless your going for that I get stressed out simply looking at your site.

Ah... I hope I don't come across as being too picky, because this is a minor (but amusing) point for some,
for others it's a pet peave:

FAQ's or FAQs?

Forming plurals using apostrophes is a common enough error,
I find it amusing that even the Germans (german's??) have
adopted this bad habit.
See http://members.aol.com/apostrophs/ even if you can't read german, it's interesting to see how many english words they are using as plurals with apostrophes in them

regards,
holzi

This is actually the second time the use of apostrophes to make FAQ plural has come up. It is absolutely correct English grammar to use the apostrophe to make a single leter plural, as in. "I will watch my P's and Q's from now on". On the other hand it is absolutely not correct to say "This forum is going to the dog's". If you consider the Q in FAQ to be plural already, I suppose it is incorrect to add 's, but if you consider it to be singular and want to add an S, then you need the apostrophe. The only thing that I'm sure is wrong is FAQs or FAQS. I've seen FAQ, FAQ's, and FAQs, all in common usage. Are there any English Phd's (note the apostrophe) out there who can answer this FAQ with authority?

I don't mean this as a personal attack, because a lot of people are leaving off the apostrophes on the plurals of acronyms, including Microsoft's Encarta and other publishing companies.

So I did some research.
I collected some interesting links and put them on a free website (in Germany).
Pardon the popup ads. That's the price you pay for a free website.
http://members.tripod.de/Top_Gun/faqs.htm
This is only the tip of the iceberg.

regards,
holzi

Well, think of it this way. When you write it out you would do it like this:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
not Frequently Asked Question's (FAQ's)

My sister is doing her masters of Rhetoric and Technical Writing at Penn State so I could ask her if you still want an academic opinion. However, I think that the Chicago Manual of Style quoted in holzi's collection, as well as the other professional opinions in there should be enough.

Interesting stuff, holzi, thanks for sharing that!

Now, my understanding is that FAQ stands for "frequently asked questions", not "frequently asked question" so it's already plural and you would not use FAQs unless you had more than one FAQ on more than one topic, such a FAQ on this *and* a FAQ on that.

What's really sad to me is how many sites I see using "their" for "there", "it's" for "its", etc. I even see these types of mistakes on CNN sometimes.

I agree, FAQ = frequently asked questions & shouldn't be FAQs