Feedback and Opinions please on this website

[Sideways Rich]

http://www.spencecomms.com/home.asp

To the collective wisdom of PH, what are your thoughts/feedback on the above website?

is it obvious what the company does?

Any areas for improvement?

The site is for a company a family member owns and I wanted to get some independent feedback/criticism/perspective and thought where better to find a bunch of intelligent forthright individuals than PH!

Thanks for looking....

[ATG]

Just had a quick look. Not bad. It isn't elaborate, it doesn't have a technical "wow" factor, but given its content is trying to deliver a down-to-earth, practical message, elaboration and technicaly wizardry would be out of place. However, I do wonder if the graphic design could be improved. The pastel colours make some of the key text hard to read, which is clearly a flaw. And if the message is about the importance and benefits of branding, the website itself probabaly needs to project the consultancy's own branding more overtly. If you're trying to get the idea of branding across to potential customers who by definition are going to have a poorer grasp of the potential breadth and subtlety of effective branding than you, going a bit more sledge hammer with your own logos, fonts and colours on the website probably wouldn't hurt. It may be rather unsubtle, but to a layman like me, it is going to say "branding" more clearly.

p.s. I thought a lot of the written content was rather good

[Sideways Rich]

ATG, thanks very much for the candid feedback and constructive points, you're absolutely right that the aim is a "pragmatic" message however you make an excellent point about emphasising the company's own brand a little more forcefully.

[1JEB]

I think it looks good.

The list of previous customers contains some well known brands so perhaps use that to introduce some more colour into the front page - scrolling logos etc. I don't think it hurts to show that off too.

[Doofus]

I like the design. Clean and clear. I would prefer your front page pulse animation to be a little shorter though.

Are you intending to put case histories behind the client logos? They display as clickable, but with no hyperlink it looks like you don't really have anything to say about them.

Anyway:

Website said:

You’ll see we’ve worked with big brands and not so big ones, helping them say the things to their prospects, customers and employees that make the biggest difference.

Split infinitive... Do I want you to say things to my customers if you can't say them properly?

Website also said:

added our ten penneth to issues

Note to all PHers: It's not fking "Penneth"! It's supposed to be an abbreviation of "Pence worth", and the word is therefore "Pen'orth" Yes, it looks wrong, I know; so say something else instead.

[RizzoTheRat]

Personally I prefer to see all the info straight away, not have to wait for a flash animation to run before I can see it. I find the Experience page quite annoying because of this, though I admit it possibly does draw the eye to each one in a way that scanning a complete page might not.

[10JH]

Why are all the blog post titles and news titles in capital letter? Looks a little strange!

[miniman]

RizzoTheRat said:

Personally I prefer to see all the info straight away, not have to wait for a flash animation to run before I can see it. I find the Experience page quite annoying because of this, though I admit it possibly does draw the eye to each one in a way that scanning a complete page might not.

Ditto, there's a nice selection of clients with some particularly big names at the bottom of the page. If you can be bothered to wait for it to load, that is.

However the copywriting is excellent.

The greeny-yellow text on white is quite hard to read and certainly wouldn't pass accessibility scrutiny. On a similar note, there's some dodgy HTML going on which will cost you in terms of SEO as well as accessibility - primarily that the h1 tag is repeated throughout the page.

[Scraggles]

too much flash, which is disabled by default

not really that apparent as to what you do, guess it is giving advice to busineses about how to be successful ?

looks like the classic mistake of registering the site to the OP's house and not his office, anyone who wants the all hours approach knows where to find him

[dudleybloke]

looks crap in opera mini 4.

[Sideways Rich]

Thanks folks for the feedback, some interesting comments....

Mini - man, you'll quickly find out that I know the square root of FA about SEO - can you elaborate on your comment and explain? Thanks

[Plotloss]

Other than the Flash component, which has no place on the web, it's nice.

[miniman]

OK if you look at the source code of the page, you'll see "h1" tags. These kind of tags define the hierarchy of the page - in other words, they let various devices understand the semantic relationship between the various bits of content, particularly how important each piece is. So you would expect a hierarchy of a main heading (h1), sections (h2) and subsections (h3). So, screen readers and, importantly, search engines, know which bits of the page are supposed to be more important than others.

Unfortunately your pages have several h1 tags (on the homepage, for example, news, blog and subscribe are all tagged as h1) - and you will get penalised for having multiple h1 tags by Google and others. In effect you are telling the search engine that news is the most important thing on the page, and blog is the most important thing on the page, and subscribe is the most important thing on the page.

It's actually worse for accessibilty (in other words, a screen reader will not be able to tell a visually impaired user what the hierarchy of content is) but it doesn't hurt to assume that Google is a visually impaired user - it doesn't understand colour, size, decoration etc. it just understands the fundamental underlying structure).

[TooLateForAName]

The colours really don't work for me. Would I give a branding exercise to a company who thing that those strange dirty pastel shades are good?

While the words seem pretty good, I am not convinced by the branding of the brand consultants tbh.

And all the flash irritates me as well. I've never been a fan of flash, sure it has its place but I expect a web site to deliver information in a clear manner. Why have the client list come up one by one in a big block?

[bitwrx]

General

1. Is the double S logo assymmetrical?
• If it is, then it looks like it's not meant to be.
• If it's not, then it looks like it is.
• Either way, looks wrong to me.
2. Are four different text colours on the home page really necessary?
3. I know the spence logo takes you back to the home-page, but I didn't think of that immediately. I clicked back about 6 times. Maybe a "home" link to the left of "about us" would be good? Might get a little cramped though. Hmmm.
4. The registered office text at the bottom is green. This fits with the home page, but doesn't work with the others. I can see why it would be green though. Hmmm.
5. General aesthetics are very good. I agree with some comments about the animations though; too slow and too fussy for my liking.

English language style comments (highly subjective):

Home Page said:

If you’re looking to improve your business by improving your approach to marketing communications, please take a look around.

Using the same verb twice in a sentence just sounds wrong; find some way round it. Perhaps "If you're looking to improve your approach to marketing communications...."?

Contacts Page said:

We know how to get to Leeds and we've even visited London so, whether it's your place or ours, we'd be pleased to hear from you.

I like this approach. None of this fake office bullst. But read that sentence pausing at each comma (and only at each comma). To my mind there should be a pause after London. I'd probably start a new sentence after "London" and drop the comma after "so".

On further reading, I think I could go on forever. It is apparent that spence and I have different writing styles. I'll stop now.

Spelling and Grammer Nazi's comments:

Nothing that jumps out just yet.


Pretty good overall though.

ETA: Just re-read my post. It sounds really negative. In actual fact that says a lot more about me than the site. Tell your man that he done good, and that I'm just a fussy bd that doesn't give success the recognition it deserves.

Edited by bitwrx on Monday 1st February 20:10