Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I recently launched my website www.NetTaxNow.com and I would appreciate your feedback.  The purpose of the site is to essentially be my virtual office where people can create an account and then we can transact business.  I am not a web designer, the website was done by a local web designer.  It uses Joomla 1.5 for the CMS and I have learned quite a bit about html since the site was created, and I have added quite a few pages on my own as well.

Basic Concept:

Clients can create an account at the website and then send me their documents online, by fax, or by mail.  In order to send documents online clients have to first register.  When they login they have access to an upload page which essentially creates a secure portal where we can exchange documents.

As it is setup on the website it is a one way portal, but I can send the client an email by which they can create a login and password to access the portal where we can exchange documents in a secure environment.

I also have documents on the website (get organized page) that the client can download and fill out with their personal information.  I have a number of landing pages, some hidden and some with links, that are targeted to specific groups for marketing purposes.  On the process page I have a video that explains how the website is intended to be used.

Finally I have a Blog page which acts as a host for my video blog which I am calling Finance 4 the rest of us.  In this section I will post videos of PowerPoint presentations on a variety of financial topics.  Currently I have an intro video posted with more on the way.

Essentially what I would like find out is the following:

1. Is the website easy to use?  Is it intuitive?  Does it make sense to the casual user.

2. What is your opinion of the general concept.  Would you use such a service?  If not, why not.

3. Your overall opinion of the design and content.

4. What changes would you suggest.

Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated.

Viewers will see a "security warning" because your site goes to https:// but has imtems or link to http:// sources.

I would suggest showing the steps to take to get a tax return done. Like (1) Register, (2).........., (3).........

..... and links to those steps. I see that you show that on this page https://nettaxnow.com/process.html , but it might be more effective to show at least the first step on the home page.

~Roland

Roland,

Thank you for the feedback.  It is much appreciated.  I will see what I can do to incorporate your advice.

I noticed the security warnings as well when using Internet Explorer.  How do I get rid of those?  This issues does not exist with Firefox.

Roland,

I just researched the mixed security warning....looks like I am going to have to live with that one....hopefully it won't put off the IE users too much....maybe I will add something that says that the sight is optimized for Firefox or anything other than IE for that matter....Thanks again for the feedback.

Made some updates.  Let me know what you think...

Well, you shouldn't "live with the security warning"... it will scare some people away.

This will be an issue when people go to "register" and get that message on your registration page.

Typically, the warning is becuase there are some items on the web page(s) that are not secure. The fix is usually as simple as specifying https:// instead of http://. Usually the issue is with links to images and/or CSS files.

Check your code you will see there are a few instances of links to HTTP:// rather than HTTPS:/

I wonder why you have your whole site under a https://? Why not only have your registration page under an https://?

~Roland

I need to talk to my web designer about that.  Once an account has been registered a user can upload their documents at the website if they wish, so the security is needed.

The other thing I noticed is that the video on the blog page which is hosted at youtube does not work when I load it as https vs. http.  This is part of the problem as well.

Thanks again for the feedback.