Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Getting ready to launch our site http://www.solution-a.com. Looking for feedback, etc or any tips to give the site that extra shine. Some of the text is not complete yet but it`s in the process of getting proofed and edited. Thanks in advance!

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!


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Solution A - "Your answer to home office and small business IT support." http://www.solution-a.com

I like it, clean. Just get your about page done. I like the name! The header logo is great too!

Erin

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Our Goal Is Your Success!
Founder Girls with Goals

I like it. Even better it shows your rates. Many companies that offer services say things like "for a price contact us". This enables you to be upfront with your clients. Good Job!

"IT" doesn`t use periods, the acronym mostly accepted is simply the two letters.

To prevent some confusion, maybe change the tagline to:
"Your answer to home office and small business IT support."

That, or "Your answer to home and small business tech support."

Your main page, two paragraphs, don`t say what it is you offer. They say what you think you do, why you went into business, and that there`s a problem of some sort in the home or small business.

I`d like to see it more direct, maybe something like:
Remember, people only scan a site for about 4 seconds. They make a determination if this is useful to them, right now, or not. They don`t have time to read about what you think is their problem. They want to see how to get a solution. Right away...y`know?

I`d like to see the subheadings in your menu "Services" reduced to only 2 words or just one. Right now it looks like an outline, too hard to read for menu items. If you need more words, put "Services" as the menu item, then use text subheadings on the destination page, with content and bullets for each subheading.

For example:
It`s redundant. Make "Support" a heading on the "Services" page. Below it, "We provide hardware and software support for both PCs, and Mac machines.

Then have Data Backup as another heading. I don`t understand why you have IT Support as a subheading, since that`s your core line of business.

I`d also put Support Plans as a separate menu item. I`m supposing this is like having your company on retainer, which is a practice not a service.

The site is clean, well laid out, and the colors are really nice. These are all little tweaks, but they matter. Your problem is going to be differentiation, and you don`t have that....yet. :-)

If you had to sum up your entire site, business, and concept in a cartoon, what would that cartoon show? No words...just pictures.

Overall it looks good. It took me a while to figure out what you do and
offer. Craig makes good suggestions about the copy on the homepage.
It isn`t very direct.

Visually speaking, it`s well laid out. Most sites I think suffer from too
much visual clutter and no direction to guide the eye and thus the
navigation. You don`t really have that prob. I do have a comment about
the compostion of your homepage and how one`s eye views it. The result
is an uncomfortable redundancy of your tagline.

Up comes the page and my eye goes to read `SOLUTION a` and then right
next to it in white "Your answer to home office and small business I.T."
Then I read the next boldest thing `Your answer to home office and small
business I.T.` in red. There`s nothing wrong with repeating a tagline on a
page but not twice in a row. It interupts the flow, and right at the outset
of browsing your site. This happens here because of the natural left to
right way we read. But not everyone reads webpages from L to R and top
to bottom. However, it is natural for us to do so and site layouts need to
be aware of that.

Also, I`m not a fan of saying `Learn More` above your navigation. I would
just drop those words. People know they`ll learn more when they click on
words like `Services` and `Rates`.

Thanks for the all the feedback! Craig and Steve both gave me the one thing I was looking for regarding knowing what my company does based off of the first page. I`ll definitely be reworking it along with taking a look at the other areas you both mentioned. Thanks again.

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Solution A - "Your answer to home office and small business IT support." http://www.solution-a.com

I like the new headline on the home page, "Computer support done right."  That makes me start feeling right away that you know what you`re doing and I can trust you.

I think the site is over all good.  It would be nice if you could make it so it resizes to fit the browser screen visitors are using.  I`m using 800x600 and part of it was off screen.

I was also confused on the Services page by the fact that your links are black and not underlined.  I didn`t realize they were links at first.  Then on other pages I was wondering if all the bold black words were links, and they weren`t.  I would suggest using the dark red underlined version for the unvisited links, and if you`re really fond of the black, use that for visited links.

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EFFECTIVE WEBSITES
when results matter

www.effective-websites.com

Thanks Danae. The link color thing was on my list for feedback response. I`m using Drupal CMS for the site and a customized theme. The theme has a global CSS format for all text links so I left it as is. I`ll experiment a bit and create a custom format for the content links that swaps the colors.  

Thanks for the heads up on the screen resolution. I didn`t think anyone used 800x600 anymore! I`ll have to play around with that. Thanks again!


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Solution A - "Your answer to home office and small business IT support." http://www.solution-a.com