Improvement suggestions for this site please

We are planning to make some changes to the home page for the site below.
We are open to any suggestions in terms of layout, html, css, search engine
optimization techniques, visual appeal, ease of navigation... etc.

The site is for a hosting company which I work with. We're always improving
on our services so if you notice that a hosting feature(s) is seriously
lacking or a missing feature that customers like a lot, please let us know
too.

For your time, we'll pick the post with the best suggestions and you'll get
one year free hosting.

www.cheapesthosting.com

Thank you.


--
Karim
http://www.cheapesthosting.com - Innovative Web Hosting since 1998
Online calendars with event email notification - Online Photo Album (RSS
Enabled)

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 19:33:18 +0100, Bryan Anderson wrote:

On Thursday, Karim wrote:

www.cheapesthosting.com

I'd make some navigation for those with Javascript turned off or
disabled for any reason, and for text-based browsers, which will
include search engines. That nav panel on the left sure looks
nice (to most people - personally I hate Windows-lookalikes), but
will be scoring against you on the useability stakes.

I'd also (and this isn't anything to do with the web site) lose
the name CHEAPESThosting. Every salesman you meet will tell you
that *cheap* isn't a good word to sell something. Inexpensive,
value for money, etc is good. Cheap is bad. Same principle as
when some asks how you are. You reply "not bad" and they hear
the word bad and take the negative. I see "cheapest hosting" and
the bit that sticks in my mind is "cheap" and everyone knows not
to buy cheap.

You need to make the text re-sizeable and the layout work around
it. At the moment I can zoom it in Firefox/Mozilla but when I use
IE to make the text larger/smaller, nothing happens.

Best not to mention the 65 errors in the HTML:

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...sthosting.com/

...or those in the CSS:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/v...sthosting.com/

There's the normal CSS layout -v- Table layout argument to be had.
There's nothing on your site (well...I've only looked at the home
page so far) that needs a table.

Design-wise....I'd say you need more white space. The overall look
of the homepage is cramped and doesn't really hang together all that
well (my opinion only).

You've got some boxes with round corners, some with square. A lot
of text in bold is hard to read as well. I'd try and clean up the
homepage and settle on one style for the boxes and maybe vary the
colours slightly to show that different boxes contain different
info.

Thanks for suggestions. I am aware that the html and css needs cleanup as
the page has been touched many times.

As for the name, the name has been used for years and it's stuck. According
to search engine referrals, many people use 'cheap' and 'hosting' as
keywords and our site comes up just because the name has it. To change the
name means basically to start all over again including search engine
inclusion. But another name can be used for another site.



--
Karim
http://www.cheapesthosting.com - Innovative Web Hosting since 1998
Online calendars with event email notification - Online Photo Album (RSS
Enabled)

In message <1fo024cddxs6$.1dv597kkkajhd.dlg (AT) 40tude (DOT) net>, Karim
<karim3411 (AT) yahoo (DOT) moc> writes

We are planning to make some changes to the home page for the site below.
We are open to any suggestions in terms of layout, html, css, search engine
optimization techniques, visual appeal, ease of navigation... etc.

The site is for a hosting company which I work with. We're always improving
on our services so if you notice that a hosting feature(s) is seriously
lacking or a missing feature that customers like a lot, please let us know
too.

For your time, we'll pick the post with the best suggestions and you'll get
one year free hosting.

www.cheapesthosting.com

Thank you.

Just a couple of comments:

(a) I looked at the site in IE6 and found the text a little smaller than
I would have liked to read. Unfortunately the text size is specified in
px, so I couldn't enlarge them through the 'View/Text Size' option.

So, I used the accessibility 'override' in IE6 to increase the size of
the text -- at which point some of the text overflowed its background
and became 'invisible':

http://www.gododdin.demon.co.uk/ng/KAR1X.JPG (90k)

If I had looked at it in Opera (where I have a minimum text size set) I
would have seen something similar:

http://www.gododdin.demon.co.uk/ng/KAR2X.JPG (90k)

So. A small problem there.

(b) You use light coloured text over a pre-defined 'blue' background
image, but with no default background colour specified.

If someone looks at your site with graphics turned off, and a light
(default) background colour set) things get interesting ;-)

http://www.gododdin.demon.co.uk/ng/KAR3X.JPG (61k)

Also, you need to put some alternative text in the <img> tags.

(c) For the benefit of people using asssistive technology
(screen-readers, talking browsers) you might want to consider:

i. Putting a 'bypass navigation' link at the start of each page to save
having to listen to the entire menu every time a new page is loaded.

http://www.gododdin.demon.co.uk/ng/KAR4X.JPG (70k)

ii. As well as styling 'headings', specify them in the HTML mark-up in
order to help page navigation.

(d) And, of course, check for typos ;-)
[unqiue] --> [unique]

regards.

--
Jake

On Thursday, Karim wrote:

www.cheapesthosting.com

Karim,

Why not redefine the bullet graphic to a <li> item
instead of all those tables and graphics?

Text is too close to the edges of boxes in Mozilla

Fixed width means I get half a screen of white and half
a screen of site.

Too many tables, try <div> instead

Code is very long for such a page.

Regards

Michael
----------------
www.mfhughes.com