suggestions on website design

[Zandor435]

I am trying to make my site look as clean and neat as possible as well as making it as optimized as possible. I would just like any over-all impressions of the site or any suggestions about details even.

This site's primary purpose is to act as a small business's prescence on the web. I know there are many tools out there that one can add to a site, but I am not sure which/if any would suit my content. Thanks for any suggestions.

http://www.appliedultrasonics.com

Zach

 

[feherke]

Hi

I think is abit crowded. But maybe just because I do not like fixed width design.

I prefer higher contrast between the background and forground colors, in my opinion, that teal is too dark. Beside this, would be some accessibility problems too. At least put some alt attributes for the images.

The date is displayed as September 23, 3905. Correct the JavaScript and do not use that Y2K Fix code :

var year=time.[red]getFullYear()[/red];

And that keyword flood at the bottom is really necessary ?

The rest of my comments would be off-topic, they belongs to forum828 ( Search Engine Optimization discussion ).

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[FesterSXS]

off-topic perhaps but I can't say nothing

You need to remove the hidden text from the bottom of your page - this is a classic SPAMMING technique and one that the Search Engines can detect.

Stress relief tensile stress compressive stress ultrasonic impact treatment esonix UIT UIP peening ultrasonic peening hammer peening shot peening metal fatigue fatigue failure weld deformation deformation welding post weld treatment TIG dressing Applied Ultrasonics

Your keywords <meta> tag is also over stuffed - the contents of this tag should not exceed 128 characters.

Good web design means designing your site for users NOT search engines. If you design your site well with proper semantic markup and plenty of relevant content then your search engine rankings will not suffer and you wont be constantly looking over your shoulder for the search engines to detect your latest spamming attempts. Once you get caught you will know about it as your site will most likely get black listed and never rank well again, or at least not for a while.

Tony

Spirax-Sarco - steam traps control valves heat exchangers
Sun Villa - Luxury Florida accommodation

 

[ChrisHunt]

Hey, that's one forward-thinking company, when I visit the site in Firefox the date shows up as "September 23, 3905". You can ask on the Javascript forum (or just Google for it) to find out how to fix that. (Personally, I'd lose the date altogether - if I want to know the date, I'll look at my calendar not your website!)

Colour choices are good and work well together. I'm not sure I like the subtle change in shade between the image and the text backgrounds on the front page, and I think I'd experiment with making the turqoise half a little bit lighter to give you better contrast with the text - It's OK now, but lighter might be better still. The menu options around the top of the home page image don't really stand out as something you can click on - but there are other ways that lead into the site, so that may not be an insuperable problem.

What is a problem is the copy. It reads more like a scientific paper than a web site - the front page is fairly inpenetrable, if you follow the link to "how it works" it gets even better:

The principle of Esonix is based on the instrumental conversion of harmonic oscillations of an acoustically tuned body into resonant impulses of ultrasonic frequency.

Ah, right, so that's how it works. OK, if I was an engineer that would probably make perfect sense, and they're your key audience - but if you're selling something there may be a lot of lay people involved in deciding to buy your product, and you'll lose their attention (and maybe a sale) with language like this.

Move as much of the technical language as you can into the pdf documents section, keep the website language simple (at least on the front page). Try reading it aloud. Try reading it to non-engineer friends. It'll be worth it.

Under the hood it's a nightmare - <font> tags galore in examples like this:

<font face="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" size="2" color="#ffffcc"></font><b></b><a href="more.htm"><font face="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" size="2" color="white"><i><b>How does </b></i></font><font size="2" color="white" face="Brush Script MT"><i><b>E</b></i></font><font face="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" size="2" color="white"><i><b>sonix work</b></i><i>???</i></font></a>

Use of CSS would save you some bandwidth and make the site easier to maintain. There are also a lot of non-standard elements in there that seem (from my Googling) to date from ancient Netscape days: [tt]<csnopos>[/tt] & [tt]<cspos>[/tt] (which don't appear to do anything) and <spacer> which you could replace with a transparent image (a "spacer gif") or, better, more CSS.

Finally, the line of keywords along the bottom isn't going to help your SEO much, it just looks messy.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[Zandor435]

Thanks a lot guys. I really appreciate the suggestions. I am working on revamping this website by myself and it really helps to have some ideas to work with.

I will change the date script promptly and look at cleaning up some of the tags. This website was built in goLive 5.0 and that is what I have to continue to work on it. I think that explains some of the sloppy code.

feherke, I am interested in any comments you might have on the sight regarding SEO. I am about to start using WebPosition Gold to help me optimize the site, but other than the basic tips the software has suggested, I would love to hear any more comments about optimizing the site.

again, thanks for the feedback to all.