Site Review 6

[Wullie]

Hi all,

We are currently going through a rebranding of our company and as such, have a new site just launched.

Any comments/suggestions are very welcome. If you don't like something, please tell me why and don't hold back.

http://www.yetihost.com

Thanks in advance,

Wullie

Fresh Look - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting
YetiHost - Coming Soon

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[cLFlaVA]

blue-eyed yetis are, somehow, cute. i like the site - it's simple enough, yet well-balanced and self-explanatory.

the main banner up top is nice, but seems a little blurry to me. maybe the images can be crispened (sp?) up a bit.

after browsing your site a little, i tried to get back home by clicking on the yeti, to no avail. ingrained in my mind is the concept of clicking a web page logo to get back home - maybe you can do that?

i might make the h1 tags a color other than black - they seem to kind of blend in with the main navigation text.

possibly give the main body text a little more line-height so it's a little easier to read.

<anal tendencies>the left nav on the home page is a few pixels wider than the same left nav on the contact, support and about pages.</anal tendencies>

lastly, the left nav is kind of hard to differentiate. in other words, i have trouble reading each separate one - the text kind of blends together. maybe again you need some line height here... not too sure.

overall, i like it - it gets to the point and gives you what you need where you expect it.

AND IT VALIDATES!



*cLFlaVA
----------------------------
[tt]mr. pibb + red vines = crazy delicious![/tt]

[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.coryarthus.com/[/url]

 

[traingamer]

Overall, I like it, too. It has a few too many graphics to please Websiteoptimization.com, but they are certainly small graphics.

It validates!

I don't like that you make the 'visited' links the same as the non-visited ones, but that's just me.

Too many tables and not enough DIVS.

Greg
"Personally, I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." - Winston Churchill

 

[Wullie]

cLFlaVA,

Thanks mate, just the type of comments I need.

the main banner up top is nice, but seems a little blurry to me. maybe the images can be crispened (sp?) up a bit.

That's something I'm currently working on, trying to get a balance between filesize and quality.

after browsing your site a little, i tried to get back home by clicking on the yeti, to no avail. ingrained in my mind is the concept of clicking a web page logo to get back home - maybe you can do that?

I've just linked the whole top banner for now, will deal with that later.

i might make the h1 tags a color other than black - they seem to kind of blend in with the main navigation text.

Will look into this and see if I can get a better colour.

possibly give the main body text a little more line-height so it's a little easier to read.

Was it only the main page you noticed this on or all of them? The reason I ask is that the other pagaes all have a slightly bigger line-height.

<anal tendencies>the left nav on the home page is a few pixels wider than the same left nav on the contact, support and about pages.</anal tendencies>

That's something I had been meaning to sort out, just never got round to it. Most of the pages should be fixed now, however I still have a few to do.

lastly, the left nav is kind of hard to differentiate. in other words, i have trouble reading each separate one - the text kind of blends together. maybe again you need some line height here... not too sure.

Will look into this as well.

overall, i like it - it gets to the point and gives you what you need where you expect it.

Thanks again.

traingamer,

I don't like that you make the 'visited' links the same as the non-visited ones, but that's just me.

That's simply personal preference for a site like this.

Too many tables and not enough DIVS.

*cough*, that's for another thread.

Thanks again guys.

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[johnwm]

Nice appearance, clean layout.
Pity about the tables!

________________________________________________________________
If you want to get the best response to a question, please check out FAQ222-2244 first.
'If we're supposed to work in Hex, why have we only got A fingers?'
Drive a Steam Roller

 

[cLFlaVA]

Wullie,

the line-height bothered me primarily on the home page, although it seems (to me, at least) that all the pages (with paragraphs of text) have the same line-height. maybe it's my bad eyes...



*cLFlaVA
----------------------------
[tt]mr. pibb + red vines = crazy delicious![/tt]

[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.coryarthus.com/[/url]

 

[ChrisHunt]

I'm just seeing a Splash/Coming Soon... page. Have you taken the site down?

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[Wullie]

John,

Thanks for the comment.

Cory,

They are slightly different. I've have a play about with them and see if I can get anything else to work.

Chris,

Try CTRL + F5, it was a splash screen for the last few months so I guess you must have that cached on your machine.

Thanks guys.



Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[GUJUm0deL]

Wullie, love the look. Nice clean site layout (the yetti made me lol, kind of a cute logo).

Here are my comments:
1. I tried to sign up for one of the shared hosting packages, and I typed in gibberish in all fields. It only catched the email address and T&C validation, but allowed me to type in 'bvxcb' as my telephone numbers, 'cxbcxb' as my state, and 'cxbxvcbxvc' as my zipcode.

2. I see all your prices are listen as £, does that mean your clientelle is mostly British (or any country that uses £)? If so, you may want to change the defaul country value from 'United States'. If not, then maybe you should display the prices as USD also.

3. I don't think you should post your email in plain view like you did for contact.cfm, i'd much rather use a form post for several reasons:
a. to avoid spammers for catching that email
b. for ppl that come to site from outside locations where outlook can't be opened up to send an email



____________________________________
Just Imagine.

http://www.imajinarts.com

 

[Wullie]

GUJUm0deL,

Thanks for the comments.

1. I tried to sign up for one of the shared hosting packages, and I typed in gibberish in all fields. It only catched the email address and T&C validation, but allowed me to type in 'bvxcb' as my telephone numbers, 'cxbcxb' as my state, and 'cxbxvcbxvc' as my zipcode.

This is actually something I have no control over at present as you are entering the details into the control panel at that point, that page is not directly on our site. For that to be changed, the CP creators would need to change it. Signups are all vetted anyway so any discrepancies in the details would be noticed. Also, because the people are paying before they actually get anywhere, from experience they are less likely to enter bogus details.

2. I see all your prices are listen as £, does that mean your clientelle is mostly British (or any country that uses £)? If so, you may want to change the defaul country value from 'United States'. If not, then maybe you should display the prices as USD also.

The company is based in the UK and it's an accounting nightmare running multiple different currencies, so we switched to GBP only a few years ago, however we still get customers from all over the world. Again, the default value is not something I can alter because this signup script is used by our resellers as well, they simply enter in their header/footer/CSS and the layout is formatted based on that, if I changed the default to be the UK then all our resellers would also default to UK.

3. I don't think you should post your email in plain view like you did for contact.cfm, i'd much rather use a form post for several reasons:
a. to avoid spammers for catching that email
b. for ppl that come to site from outside locations where outlook can't be opened up to send an email

Everywhere an e-mail address appears on the site, if you look at the source it is actually encoded, there are no e-mail addresses on the site in plain view as such. The form is something we used to have but it was abused so we removed it, however we likely will add one back in the future.

Thanks again.

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[GUJUm0deL]

Wullie, just outta curiousity, if I wanted to move my site onto your servers, what would be the USD price for S-Delta?


____________________________________
Just Imagine.

http://www.imajinarts.com

 

[Wullie]

Hi mate,

I can't really answer that here without risking the thread being pulled for advertising, however you can use the following to work it out:

http://www.xe.com/ucc/

Just enter the amount, then select GBP in the first downdown and USD in the second. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us through the site.

Strangely enough this is the first site we have had where there was not a currency convertor on it, every other one you could select the currency and all the prices on the site updated to reflect the approximate amount in your local currency.

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[ChrisHunt]

Thanks Wullie, I can see it now (albeit on my work PC, haven't tried it at home yet).

Everywhere an e-mail address appears on the site, if you look at the source it is actually encoded

I don't think that's gonna help you much. If a browser can decode those entity codes, so can a spam bot. See here for some research:

http://www.unicom.com/chrome/a/000388.html

. Still, it's better than nothing I suppose.

I don't have much to say about the design. I think I'd have a little more padding around the text in the main content area - it looks a bit cramped as-is.

The only thing I really don't like is the grey blurs under the writing in the logo. It just looks like you wrote it with a pen and then smudged it, and it also accentuates the jpg compression artifacts. Oh, and there's no [tt]alt[/tt] attribute for that image either, I think it should be [tt]alt="YetiHost"[/tt].

What a shame you don't offer Unix hosting...

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[Wullie]

Chris,

Thanks for your comments.

I don't think that's gonna help you much. If a browser can decode those entity codes, so can a spam bot. See here for some research:

http://www.unicom.com/chrome/a/000388.html

. Still, it's better than nothing I suppose.

I do realise it doesn't totally stop spam, but I have been using this method for a while now on some addresses and it does help cut it down. I've gone a bit further now and changed them to images, so we'll see how that goes. And before anyone comments, I know that some bots can read images as well.

I don't have much to say about the design. I think I'd have a little more padding around the text in the main content area - it looks a bit cramped as-is.

I'm going to be working on this more today, so will see what I can do with this.

The only thing I really don't like is the grey blurs under the writing in the logo. It just looks like you wrote it with a pen and then smudged it, and it also accentuates the jpg compression artifacts.

This is something that looked a lot better in the higher quality image and I do agree with you that it looks a bit strange now. I'll look into doing something with this today.

Oh, and there's no alt attribute for that image either

There is now.

What a shame you don't offer Unix hosting...

<whisper>Watch this space</whisper>

Thanks again.

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[GUJUm0deL]

Wullie, how would you deal with potential customers that come to the site from public places that don't allow outlook or other mail clients to pop up when they click on the email link?


____________________________________
Just Imagine.

http://www.imajinarts.com

 

[Wullie]

Wullie, how would you deal with potential customers that come to the site from public places that don't allow outlook or other mail clients to pop up when they click on the email link?

My personal take on this is if you don't have access to send e-mail, you are less likely to contact people where you hear back by e-mail. Sure they could use the form, but how do they get our response? They must have an e-mail account somewhere or they cannot sign up with us through the site, the welcome e-mail etc is all sent by e-mail. If they do have an address and won't be checking their e-mail until the next day, it makes more sense to contact us the next day as well. This has been the same on our site for quite a few years now. Our responses are quick so there is no reason for a potential client to contact us many hours or days in advance of needing an answer.

For existing clients, they have a support request section which authenticates them and then shows them various forms that they can use, so this this would only affect potential clients.

Hope this helps

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[GUJUm0deL]

Wullie, no, you misunderstood. Let's say your user has only an hotmail acct and they need to login via hotmai.com only, having the webpage kick open outlook can't help an individual in that case.

This was more of a curiousity thing then anything else.

____________________________________
Just Imagine.

http://www.imajinarts.com

 

[Wullie]

Then thay need to either manually put the e-mail address into Hotmail or configure their machine so mailto links open in Hotmail.

It's really up to them to make sure their machine is configured how they need it.

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[cLFlaVA]

Wullie,

It's really up to them to make sure their machine is configured how they need it.

i have to whole-heartedly disagree with you there. Who are you kidding? You're expecting users, potential clients, to have their computer set up to best suit your website's needs?

come on!

hands down, it would be more beneficial for you to have a contact form on your site. people are lazy. i can even say from personal experience that i have not contacted a site because when i click "contact us" an outlook email pops up, which i don't use.



*cLFlaVA
----------------------------
[tt]mr. pibb + red vines = crazy delicious![/tt]

[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.coryarthus.com/[/url]

 

[Wullie]

i have to whole-heartedly disagree with you there. Who are you kidding? You're expecting users, potential clients, to have their computer set up to best suit your website's needs?

come on!

I didn't say anything like that, I said originally that at this point, we do not and will not have a form because it was abused, but we may add it in the future. The form has already been ruled out by that point and the comments were about mailto links. Then I was asked what about people who click on a Mailto and it opens Outlook, but they need to use Hotmail. That is absolutely nothing to do with my site and is a configuration issue with the person's computer. Their computer handles mailto links, not my servers and I have no way to open a certain webmail/mail client or would I even know what they personally wanted to happen. If they have their machine set to use Outlook and they need to use Hotmail, that really is not my problem.

Wullie

YetiHost - Quality Coldfusion 7/Windows Hosting

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell