Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I just read through the website critique posted for the collegiate laundry service website.  This group has such an interesting perspective that I would like to submit our site for a group review. 

We are attempting to attract business clients who appreciate the value of a properly running IT environment while at the same time demonstrating that it doesn`t have to cost an arm and a leg.  We would like people who are interested, whether a little or a lot, to become engaged with a process for turning their interest into sales.  Eventually the site will contain things like white paper and reports about tech stuff, but for now we are truly just trying to breathe life into this end of our sales process.  We have a sales staff, me, who can follow up on lead generation, but haven`t had a whole lot of traffic off of this piece so any advice on getting people to the site would also be appreciated. 

I designed this with the help of a professional web designer.  The content is all mine, and the layout is done in .net nuke from a template.  We probably have about 40 to 80 hours into the whole thing but this is irrelevant to change.  We don`t have a problem striking things out or making content changes.  Please feel free to be as candid as possible. Thanks in advance!

http://www.thetechnologypool.com

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Steve Bennett Director of Sales The Technology Pool (269)373-9040

http://www.thetechnologypool.com

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Steve Bennett Director of Sales The Technology Pool (269)373-9040

There seems to be some usability issues here ... the links don`t behave in link-like ways. For example, there`s no hover change, underlining, differentiation, etc ... it just makes it hard on a beginning user if they have to go looking for links.

The load time seems slow for such a small site.

This is meaningless:
"Imagine - Technology demystified."
What I am looking for:
what`s in it for me
why you are different and better
what is it going to cost me

And I`m not getting that in a very clear way from the home page.

I can give some actual suggestions on text later, if someone else doesn`t beat me to it.

I just got done doing a long-term project, converting whitepapers and slides into something useful online, for a global technology group. I learned a great deal, and was quite surprised at problems arising out of fundamental assumptions. What seemed a no-brainer to me was being promoted as sophisticated "new" knowledge. Amazing!

Anyway, coming out of that, reading your introductory post, I think you`ve got a core problem....perhaps we could call it a mission-statement problem.

One of the biggest issues today is a growing split between The Business, and IT. For some reason, IT people seem unable to comprehend that computers aren`t the end-all, be-all of running a business. Generally speaking, all the way up to the CIO level, there seems to be a near complete disconnect between using technology, and understanding how to pay for that technology.

On the other side of the split is The Business. These are the people who really don`t care what computers can do, and expect only to sit down, hit some keys, and things happen. How they happen isn`t interesting, as long as it happens. Only when things don`t happen as expected does anyone look up the extension number for the IT department.

If this is the situation at the enterprise level, how do you propose to solve or reconile that situation? Are you scaling down? If not, then I can only suggest that your target market of The Business might not be a viable market. Again, my opinion, based on the view from a big consulting firm, and not being an employee there.

What is it that you offer, in other words. Not what do you do. :-)

Nicole:

Thank you for taking the time to look through what I`m putting together.  This sight was assembled in D.N.N.,  ".NetNuke",  I`m going to talk with the guy who assembled it and see what can be done to put in some, "...link like ways".  Any suggestions on color or style to optimize readablity?  Are you recommending sub text like a very small blurb that pops up when you curse over the links or am I misunderstanding your thoughts?

You said in your post, "This is meaningless:
"Imagine - Technology demystified."
What I am looking for:
what`s in it for me
why you are different and better
what is it going to cost me

We were attempting to paint a picture to describe how "Smoke and Mirrors" tech support can be and that we take away the smoke and mirrors.  Craig Landes put together some information after you finished that addresses the same issue with a little more depth.  I need to work on that.  Overall I think we need to remove a great deal of the text on the home page, summarizing the paragraphs into bullets that describe what we offer.  I`ll put together some ideas over the next few days and post them here.  I appreciate your input so far and would love to hear what you have about those ideas as well.

Thank you!

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Steve Bennett Director of Sales The Technology Pool (269)373-9040

Welcome :-) Feel free to post about the changes, `cause people here tend to go back and follow up.