Please could you all cast your eye over this site

I didn't get far. The home page displays this message:

Actually, I had Flash turned off (after having had my ears blasted off by another site). However, you might ask your client - How is a visitor supposed to do that if they are visiting from work, school, an Internet cafe, or public library? To say nothing of devices that do not run Flash (such as the iPhone).

I don't think I'm alone in turning off Flash. The Flashblock plug-in for Firefox gets over 23,000 downloads a week.

Also note that all that absolute positioning creates tremendous problems with other than "normal" text sizes. My laptop ships with a 120 DPI setting that gives IE a 25% larger text. So lots of the content gets hidden.

Try increasing the text size to see what I mean.

Finally, it's good you are redesigning this. All that inline CSS and JavaScript must be an absolute nightmare to maintain.

Good luck.

Hey

Bless you for taking the time out to reply. Im grateful. Yes I did notice some of your points, and bar the 'usual' improvements, I was keen in hearing everyone elses opinion!

Thanks again

Mario

I am a college student and one of my assignments was to choose a site to critique. I have choosen your site and hope that what I found will be useful. I am not usually a critic so bear with me. I found this site very easy to read, navigate, and understand. All the links work properly and upload fairly quickly. This site also complies with the three-click rule for easy navigation. One thing that I noticed right away was the flames at the top of the home page. I felt like they were out of place with the very blocked link pictures and the rest of the page. In the words written below it said "...we remain on the cutting edge". The flames don't give the image of a cutting edge company. When entering the link I found that the words appeared before the background pictures and when they came into focus I would be reading and then I would lose my place. I think that you should use either the background picture or the smaller pictures, but not both of them together. Very distracting. One last thing I noticed was under the link about us the word organization is spelt wrong. I hope this has been useful, and earns me a good grade.

Dear mfdc,

I took a look at the site and whilst I like the simplicity of the words becoming picture links I am not so keen on the flames at the top.

My own forte is SEO work so I took a look at your page from a search engine perspective and would be amazed if the site really gets a meaningful numbers of visitors.

The page title for example says 'Home' and absolutely nothing about recruitment.

I have written an article that I think you might find useful and it is posted on a forum run by the same people who run this site.

http://www.apaddedcell.com/making-web-pages-search-engine-friendly

I hope that gives you food for thought

TerribleTerry

I'm on a slow dial-up connection and the images are taking forever to load - the flame header image took quite a while, and the little images/links are still loading. (If I was just browsing the web and came on this site, I'd have left a long time ago.

Change the title tag to something relevant instead of 'Home'. (The images/links are still loading.)

The whole black box/header just feels wrong. (The page just stopped loading.) It's like you plucked it out of your graphics program and plopped it onto the page without much thought - maybe make the header 100% (browser width) black with the image centered?

I just clicked "commercial" and the first thing I noticed is that the page doesn't look much like your front page - no real consistency in design. (And the "Click here.." register and view are on top of each other in Mac Firefox 2 and Safari 2).

~silverwing - flashy appeal shouldn't take precedence over substance.

At first glance I found this site to be a bit too unprofessional looking for the topic. For a recruiting company you'd probably want something that looks very professional and conservative. Use muted colours (grey, blue, dark maroon would be good). Photos of people in the workplace would be good.

The animation absolutely needs to go. It has no place on a site like this and is just distracting from the content.

You should suggest to the client that they hire a graphic designer and get a proper logo done. The logo is the visual identity for the company so it should be more than a default typeface and crappy piece of clipart.

From a marketing perspective, any calls to action ("Call us now") should be immediately followed by either the phone number of contact us link. Page titles need to include some better keywords for search engines merged into something that encourages people to click on the search listing.

The service areas of the business should figure strongly in the page text and home page title tag to narrow down the audience. You'll probably want to use the geotargetting features in Webmaster Tools for this site.

Be careful about using too much of the same content on all the pages. If the text looks too similar from page to page Google will drop some pages. One of our members here experienced a sharp drop in rankings recently IMO because of duplicate content issues.

Wow, I absolutely do not like the header and that is the first thing that jumps out at me. The rest of the homepage is kind of just floating under the header. The about us page has no banner at all which is not uniform to the rest of the site. I also noticed that the links under the banner are not uniform on all of the pages. When you click to go to any of the sectors, each sector has its own look and feel. I am not sure if this was purposely, but it gives the impression that you are at a different site. These are just a few thoughts that I hope are helpful to you.