website appraisal

[Chipper]

Scott, the keywords thing in titles etc is usually worth doing , you could/should pick up leads from the site. If your work is local/regional, make something of that as well. Srch engine wise it's better to do well in a niche that try and compete with a zillion other fishes in a big sea; we've done this for my other half whose site is result number one, page 1 in Google, for searches on what she does in our area and the site brings in plenty of work.

Just imagine what words or phrases people might use to search for you, while making eadch title/heading relevant to the page. Headings/titles get extra 'weighting'.

The form as mentioned is a good point too, some people like to email, others to ring and some fill in a form, it's good to have all routes open.

HTH a bit anyway,
cheers
Bill

 

[scott0031]

Scott, you have to change carried to carry. No question. You're saying that you don't do it any more! It's not what you did that matters, it's what you DO!

Edit - you could also change the tense slightly and say "we have always carried out general and precision engineering work for local business, now a mainstay of Ward Engineering"

or something like that...

If I'm going to be picky, after "qualified toolmaker" you should have a semi-colon or a full stop, rather than a comma.

Sorry, I can get heavily into sub-editing text. Blame my missus for writing too much and me looking over her shoulder.

Drains, thanks for that articulate input. This has been very debated by myself, close colleague and the web designer and none of us could come to suitable conclusion, It has been re written many times. I had hope the last bit of that sentence would have covered it.

We also carried out general and precision engineering work for local business, which has now become the main stay of Ward Engineering to date.

But how you guys read it is what counts and not how i intended it to be read. I think its probably best i get this type proofed. I have a friend who is an ex London legal Secretary. I think I should give her a call.


Thanks for the input, much appreciated.

The site looks good and informative, and above all professional (could have a slightly more 'personal' feel using images of company personnel, buildings etc).

Just a couple of things I'd consider though. A few of the internal links open pages in new tabs which is a bit messy... people don't like having to close multi windows to exit a site; and I would always have a contact form, even if you don't really expect people to contact via email, it's proven to make a difference.

I do get the missing 'personal feel'. It is to a degree by design as it would be images of me and me alone........... and that's not pretty..... at all... or it would some sheep as i work out of farm. I had a feeling neither would work very well. Again it also comes down to budget. Getting decent usable images isnt that easy....... without paying someone to come in and do them. I will certainly keep that in mind if the site ever has a full revamp and a bigger budget.

I'm not sure when the site goes live if it will still have the new window opening problem, as its still on a test server. If its still there I will get it altered as I also hate new windows opening. Its more of a site dictating to you, rather than you being in control of the site.

We did have a contact form but removed it, I will most certainly look at that again.


Many thanks for the constructive comments.


Scott

 

[graffian]

Images need resizing.
They are being resized by the code. I didn't read all the posts but I did see web designer mentioned, I hope the images will be edited if your paying. it's not hard to edit images.

I just download one image, it's over a mb and I downloaded a small picture!
I would have expected 20k at the most. I saved your image as a
50% jpg and it's only 37k, that's full size 1000+ x whatever.
It's easy enough to resize images. Yes I converted the png to jpg. The pic on the right is the size of image I downloaded, it was 1mb, it's now 6kb! The one on the left [it is being resized by this page] is full size and is 37k. I have gone for 50% quality, you can see some artifacts, bit less compression wouldn't do any harm. Doing this will make the images load faster. Your site isn't to bad, I know of a bike owners club that has a page with thumbnails that are images straight from a camera
Otherwise nice clean layout.
The windows opening is how it's coded, it opens new tabs for me[which I don't really mind]. It won't change with a change of server, the anchor tags need editing.

 

[mike os]

meta data still worth having

images... thumbnails on page should be the same size as they are shown ie is the placeholder is 150x100 px the image should be 150x 100px (and 72dpi) jpeg giff or png format. this means you end up with 2 images "on file" a thumb and larger image for the galery which again should be "full size" if placeholder is 300x200px then that is the size for the image,

front page is a mess mate... (sorry) if you want to send me the code, css and images I will have a look for you... if you are paying someone to do it they really should know how to deal with text flow around an image

 

[Sid]

You said you were told the images loading slowly won't be a problem on a live server. ****** My connection is what it is, the server I'm in contact with doesn't change that.

The images must be resized. The first impression of the site was one that reminded me of dial up.

Speed is king on the interweb, and the site is far too slow.

******MOD - Possibly defamatory remarks removed following a complaint