Could I please have a critique of my latest site?

http://rowellservices.com

Thank you in advance.

On 13 Apr 2007 21:49:12 -0700
nshiflett (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

http://rowellservices.com

Thank you in advance.

Hi,

A few alarm bells ring for me concerning this site, but I am sure my
more acerbic colleagues can and will express some of these fairly
forcefully :-) For myself can I say:

1. The site is a little brown and tan! It reminds me a lot of
Ubuntu Linux (my OS of choice!). Perhaps you could brighten the
colours up a little?

2. You are coming perilously close to meta tag spamming with your
large number of meta keywords in the head and this thought is
reinforced at the base of the page with your very large number of
similar entries (almost 'invisible text'. It is an obvious shot at
search engines. You could lose the meta keywords completely to start
with.

3.You have used flash as your primary navigation tool which could
backfire if the end-user has wrong version / no flash etc. At the
least you could perhaps provide a non-Flash alternative.

4. Your font sizes are a little small for my default settings and I
notice the layout breaks if the font size increases. Have you
considered a flexible layout and font sizes in ems rather than px?

5. You have several validation errors that you should fix. I note
that you are using a Transitional Doctype when a new document would
be better with a Strict Doctype.

6. On a more general note it was not immediately apparent when I
first saw the page exactly what was being sold. I am getting a little
slow and old but perhaps this could be spelled out succinctly at the
top of the page?

7. Lots of tables :-) You could consider losing the tables and
perhaps tidying up the source code a little: it is a little difficult
to read. Was this generated by an editor?

All the best with you site!!

Andrew

--
Andrew's Corner
http://people.aapt.net.au/~adjlstrong/

nshiflett (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

http://rowellservices.com

Thank you in advance.

Andrew points out the brown-ness of the site, but I don't think it's so
bad. It's not a very /lively/ site, but it's not as drab as many are. Of
course, I'm kind of a beige guy myself. ;-)

The first thing I notice, though, is the house, and it looks like a
home-builder's site. Turns out it's not: it's the site of a guy who
installs gutters and mows lawns. Kind of weird, then, that the front
page photos show very little actual lawn and no discernable gutters.

Along with the big house picture, I notice the microscopic text size
used. This, I believe, is the smallest size used for regular (i.e.,
non-footer or legalese) text I've ever seen. Or almost seen. And Andrew
is right when he points out that the design is not ready for larger,
actually-legible font sizes. The elements are already overflowing at my
defaults; I have to bump the text-size *down* to get everything to fit
nicely.

Yes, you're spamming the search engines with the text in the lower
center. That text (even enlarged to a readable size) is of no help to
the human visitor. Besides which, there's no mention of lawn-mowing in
the list of spam terms, although it merits its own menu item.

Flash: no. The house is a Flash movie, just so you can have clouds going
by in the background. When I look at those clouds they make me think the
neighbor's house is on fire. (Maybe they used cheap, *flammable*
gutters.) Flash-only navigation is weak. The nav items at page-bottom
are too far down to be convenient. In the Flash element, in the
upper-right corner, up above the Contact Us menu item, are three teeny
icons. The one on the right is an envelope, and oscillates in tandem
with Contact Us (and both take me to the contact page). The icon on the
left is a tent, and links to Home. Then there's an icon in the middle.
It looks like a network icon, but doesn't help me troubleshoot my LAN.
What is that thing for? And last on the Flash list: the Flash thing
appears to reload fresh on every visit to every page, although it
appears identical everywhere. Can't you get it to cache or something?

The site could use a hint of human personality. Show us Mr. Rowell. How
long has the firm been in business (unless it's been, like, three
weeks)? There is a single gloved hand on a wheelbarrow, and a faceless
silhouette riding a lawnmower on a golf course, both on the Lawn Care
page and repeated in the Flash Gallery. Where are the faces? Show me
that the people are happy when they work (or take a break for the
photographer), or that they concentrate when they're nailing a gutter to
my house.

The Gallery is a series of rather uninformative and uninspiring photos
in a silent Flash movie.

The Resources page is scary. How did those links get chosen? Why would I
click on "WWVRI" in the first place, having no other information about
the link? Well it turns out that WWVRI is a timeshare site. Link one is
to "House Rental Maui", a site which seems to have little relationship
to gutter-buyers in Florida. Link #2 is "Invest-In-U", which I am
guessing is the same start-your-own-ome-improvement-company that got Mr.
Rowell into business. Mostly, I think that the Resources page is just a
way to fool the Googles of the world by providing specious links of no
use to the site's visitors (which is why the Resources item is hidden at
the bottom). After seeing this page (in combination with the spam-laden
Home page), I think Rowell Services is not a serious company, and the
site is part of the get-rich-quick scheme of the owner. I'd buy my
gutters elsewhere.

BTW, the links on the Resources and Site Map pages vanish on hover. And
in your CSS (apart form the previous problem), your link rules need
rearranging, in the order link-visited-hover-active. As it is now,
visited links will never show the hover effect.

And finally, nine levels of table nesting is about eight too many. Use
some actual markup and CSS instead. The inline styling is tedious and
error-prone, and since you've got a stylesheet already, put it to use.
It'll make your site easier to maintain and provide faster, cleaner code
for the visitor.

All in all, I'm left with the feeling that the company has been recently
and quickly thrown together, and the site has been wacked together
quickly using some rather sloppy tool, using the barest amount of actual
content, probably because there's so little substance to present. I have
the suspicion that many/most/all of the photos are actually stock photos
from some CD, which is why we never see Mr. Rowell, Carlos, Mike, etc.
in action. Visitors shouldn't feel suspicious, or used.

HTH
--
John

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:49:12 -0700, nshiflett wrote:

http://rowellservices.com

Thank you in advance.

I went and mowed my own lawn while the flash navigation loaded over
dialup.

nshiflett (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

http://rowellservices.com

What everybody else said, plus...

Privacy Policy page, about halfway down:
"Rowell Services, LLC. and/or its affiliates have two primary uses for
its cookies. First, we use them to specify a Customer's preferences. For
example, Customers can specify keywords across several categories or
markets so you don't have to tell us repeatedly about certain features
in the home you are seeking."

So you're in the real estate business, too? BTW, unless I missed
something, your site doesn't use any cookies in the first place.

You didn't pay very close attention to whatever template you used (or
the web site you stole) to create this.

--
Berg

nshiflett (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

http://rowellservices.com

Thank you in advance.

Above and beyond what others have posted:

On the right side, you ask "Why do I need gutters?" and then proceed to
tell me the problems with gutters. I still have no idea why I need
gutters if there are so many problems with them. Even if I follow the
"continue reading" link, I still don't get much on why I *need* gutters.

Nice competition advertisement from Google about "www.guttermax.com". I
followed it. Might just call them first if I need something. Thanks for
the recommendation.

BTW, Where are you? I'm in Texas. Do you service that area?

Good luck!
Frank

Wow, thanks for the comments. I should have explained that this site
was derived from a garbage real estate template and I'm putting this
together for them for FREE, not even charging them for hosting. Their
original page is at

http://www.realpages.com/sites/rowellservicellc/

I did not have very much to work from as you can see as far as the
content goes. I agree, bad idea with the links and the spammy
content, I will also work on cleaning up the code. Thanks for the
second set of eyes on the overall theme and the suggestions on having
their photos on the site, this is intended the pictures on there now
are basically placeholders.

I appreciate the constructive crits, but to those who assume this is
some kind of get rich quick site... get a life, I'm just trying to
help someone out. And the little icon that looks like a "network" icon
is actually a link to the sitemap just have not connected it yet.

Regards,
Nate

nshiflett (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

I should have explained that this site
was derived from a garbage real estate template and I'm putting this
together for them for FREE, not even charging them for hosting.

The tone of the responses you got might have been a little different had
you mentioned this up front.

I appreciate the constructive crits, but to those who assume this is
some kind of get rich quick site... get a life,

Sorry, but it did come across that way whether you meant it or not.

--
Berg

nshiflett (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:

http://rowellservices.com

The link:hover colors are inconsistent. The text completely disappears

for the links under "Rowell Services LLC." On the right the hover color is
blue. At the bottom it is usually white (one link does not change color).
On other pages the underline disappears.
I have flash disabled so I have no idea what may be provided in that box.

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)