Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

OK, here`s some notes I made while looking at your site:


On your nav bar: "Frequently Asked Question"
Only One?

In your home page: "OCR (Optical Character Resolution) "  
OCR is Optical Character Recognition.

Is this a spelling error, or a new term: "typographycopy editing"


In your About Me page: "...central stenographic pool for the University faculty and staff."
Which university?

Don`t use underlined text - it looks too much like it should be a link.

It is considered to be bad typography to have more than two fonts on any document.  Your home page has four, five or six, depending on how you count fonts.  Inside the blue box, you have a san-serif font, but the highlight of your name is a serifed font.  Your "Services Offered" starts in sans-serif in the header, followed by serif font in the bullet-pointed list, then your next list is san-serif, black and a different paragraph spacing, followed by a blue line of serifed text, then another header in sans serif...  You get the picture, your typography is all over the place.

Now, back to the text in the box...  It`s very weak.  Lots of passive voice.  You need to get rid of the passive voice and be more forceful about your services.  This is where you need to present a solution to the viewer`s problems.  Try this:

"You have worked weeks or months on the manuscript for that perfect book, journal article, manual, brochure, newsletter or in-house publication.  Now you need Crescent Moon DPD to provide the professional assistance with an eye for detail to prepare a professional document ready for publication. You will receive personal attention to every detail of the project from beginning to end."

(Publication and Printing are the same thing; Book and Textbook are redundant, which is why I dropped them).

Notice the difference?  In my suggested text, you are not *asking* for their business, you are *telling* them why they need you.

You could use an image of a pile of handwritten pages that represents the manuscript for "War and Peace, Episode Two" that needs to be transcribed into a computer-friendly document.

Personally, I would get rid of the box.

By the way, the phrase "Desktop Publishing" is sooooo twentieth-century.  



-------------------------

Steve Mann
Internet Videographer
MannMade Digital Video
My Email

Hi Susan :-)
I think I`d either remove the empty "Publications" page, or put some titles in there. As to the "TEST" tab, that sounds either like you`re using it to test Web programming, or it`s some sort of test for people to take. You likely could do better with something like "Contact Us."

The overall front page is too "big," for want of a better word. I`m using a high-resolution LCD panel, and it`s big on my screen. Ergo, it likely is huge on a typical monitor...even though they`re changing these days.

Here`s a bugaboo of mine, where you have a "Welcome to" headline on your page. Of course I`m welcome, so it`s redundant. Then to have it in blue, underlined, I just assumed it was a link to somewhere else.

The page title should at least be changed to "Crescent Moon - Desktop Publishing Services." Right now, with "Home," you don`t get much benefit from search engines.

Right now, your meta description is 215 characters long.  Google only shows 150 characters in the results page blurbs, and a "..." if there`s more. With good copywriting, you should be able to get exactly 150 characters.

All in all, it`s pretty clear what you do, but I`m not so sure what it is you`re offering. There`s not much persuasive content describing my problem, and how you`re going to solve that problem. How much DTP do I do?

What`s your target market? How do you know they have a problem? What is that problem? And how will you solve that problem?

What I`d like to see would be a Web page that highlights the skills you`re offering in design, as a DTP expert. The Web page looks pretty simplistic, so to speak, and I found myself thinking that if this is how you do other documents, I`ll just use In-Design or something like it. See?

So if you can`t do it, then be sure to hire someone who can bring your vision to the Web, not only to desktop publishing. Otherwise, I think you`re hurting yourself in the layout and design here.