REVIEW REQUEST: www.monitor365.com

Site looks Very good and I registered myself too
cader

Well i went through all the standards....resolution etc etc etc. Even at 800x600 theres very little horizontal scrolling, wish i could say that for my site... lol...

The design is good as well, sleek and easy to look at in an aesthetical point of view, but it lacks 'something' at the top end of the site, maybe a full blown company banner/logo running across the top end of the site may make the impact, but its really down to your own views on how a site should look, some people like top head logos, other people don't

Also, something else i noticed. Most of the links require you to log in or register a new account. You may think about making an 'About Us' or company mandate (like a 'what we do') page so new visitors to your site can look at that page and see the WHOLE range of different things your company does. That page can be the 'hard sell' of the website to entice the casual person who enters the site through a search engine to register.

some of the colours your using aren't web safe colors, meaning they can appear different in different machines, main difference is the content section, it's an off white which is greyer in Mozilla and whiter in IE, way around this is to make your graphics (3 of them, 2 top and email) transparent, this way the background color wont be comparable.
You should be careful with underlined text and underlined and non underlined links as they can get confused, instead of underlined text, maybe italic? and maybe color your links to something lighter than that blue.
I like the top icon (pc and screen outline) but the blue is similar to the background (gets lost in it)

there is a slight alignment problem in opera6, in your nested table tag (second table tag) you have two %'s on the tables width, remove one and it should fix it, if not, remove the second % anyway and add width="100%" into the td cell with Interface_4 in it. you should also add alt tags to those images tags as well.
there are a few font tags etc in your code that aren't doing anything (around image links etc), you should remove all the font tags and use CSS for them (most are probably covered by your css now anyways). I found some more empty tags so maybe add a DOC type tag and run it through the validater at w3c.org to help you find some errors (most are extra font tags)

over all it's a nice layout, could so with a extra colour or two (headings, links or change the grey)

I get a small horizontal scrollbar at 800*600.

I too think the overall layout is nice but the monitor graphic at the top is very jaggedy and to me spoils the look. Also the 'web update monitor' & 'web server monitor' graphics look blurry.

I'd probably have done the 'Monitor365 - Reliable Web Monitoring' as a graphic in a nice font to make it stand out as your logo and have this on every page of the site. I can see what you've done now is to use that space to lable the page but you really need a consistant logo on each bage.

I will reiterate what Busy said about the underlined text, don't do that make it bold to stand out otherwise it looks like a link.

The only other thing to add is that I would use the orange from the 'New account sign up' graphic for an on hover colour for the top navigation.

Good work.

hello, i like it too, only knit pick i have for your front page is some of the wording, "Immediately know when your web site cannot be accessed!" i dont know but it didnt read properly to me, maybe "know immediaetly" or "be alerted"
good luck with the site, and its a usefull service..

Overall a good site, but a pedantic web designer can always find something wrong, so here goes...

You are using a few deprecated FONT tags, really it's best to use CSS for everything.

There's no doctype at the start of the HTML, this identifies what version and type of HTML you are using, not only good for running through the W3C's validator, but this also gives you a set of standards to work towards (removing deprecated FONT tags for a start )

The colour scheme needs a little work, I always think a little bit of orange goes down well with blue and grey, especially on parts that need to stand out (and to re-iterate what The Webmistress said: Things such as the "New Account" button...This could really do with some orange!)

The logo needs anti-aliasing to remove those jagged edges, again orange could be used to make it stand-out.

As said: Overall a good site, bit of aesthetics work and it'll be brilliant. Obviously there's not a lot I need to say about the product itself...That has a lot of potential! Are you going to do SMS for free, or will there be some form of subscription charge?

Quote: Originally posted by JeevesBond
and to re-iterate what The Webmistress said: Things such as the "New Account" button...This could really do with some orange

The "New Account" button is orange!

Sorry, I did read your post wrong there...Although it isn't orange on my monitor (I am my crap PC in work to look at this though), I'll have another look when I get home and apologise if it is orange

Now that I've re-read Web Mistresses post I have to agree there should be some rollover effect on the links at the top (although a more orange colour would be better IMO).

Thank you all for the very useful feedback! This forum is such a wonderful service and I greatly appreciate your help.

-Mike

Your logo definitely does need some work and as others have mentioned, consistent placement on every page. You might want to actually hire a professional to design a logo. It really is an art in itself.

Another thing I'm noticing, particularly on the support page, is that something needs to be done to prevent text lines from getting too long at higher resolutions. What you could do is put a max-width into your CSS for that body table, which would at least help those using intelligent browsers (IE doesn't support max-width) Otherwise you could go with a fixed width table, or put in bigger margins so the text doesn't stretch as far.

I defintely wasn't expecting the other links to take me out of the template. Those login boxes should be placed within the same template as the other pages.

Otherwise this looks really good. It kind of reminds me of the opera.com site. Clean and functional.

I might resize the two monitor graphics on the homepage they seem a little stretched and distorted. I like the box-ish layout and blue colors. The text is easy to read and navigation is simple to follow.

Hi Mike,

The site looks good. I just registered to test your service but the 1 hour ping is just way to big of a gap, so could you please tell me how to delete my account? (or maybe you can delete it for me, my login is "sarvi")

Thanks and good luck.

Hello Saeed,

You can PING at intervals as short as 5 minutes if you want. Anyway, I'll remove your account as you requested.

Best wishes,
Mike

Quote: Originally posted by mike_kronenberg
You can PING at intervals as short as 5 minutes if you want. Anyway, I'll remove your account as you requested.

Well, when I viewed I only had the options 1 hour up to a week or something like that.

Pretty nice looking site and a pretty good idea although I'm sorry to say this is coming from a real rank amateur. Maybe my input might be good from a 'mystery shopper' perspective. I kind of agree with the person who said it lacked something up top but then again, if you looked a mine you would probably say my 'up top' is over the top. I'm still trying to figure out if there is some kind of standard site 'look' because I notice a lot of sites look like newspapers but I'm thinking that's the image that might work for business like sites. Again, sorry for my technical void.

I like that one. Very professional looking, colors are working as well as layout. Navigation is also simple enough.

-Teemu