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I'm starting a side project and have begun piecing together a web design firm to make some money on the side from my day job. So far I'm simply designing the overall design and look of the page before it's coded, via images.

If you could, please provide some constructive criticism from the website and give me the bottom line: would you consider purchasing services from my company?

http://www.illiniwebdesign.com/

I like the look and feel a lot; however, it somewhat resembles a blog - this might just be because of the color selection.

Overall, yeah, I would consider purchasing your services.

reserved for lunchtime commentary

The Site that you link a reference of is down, this would not be a good example of your work if the site is down indefinitely, or if it is down when potential customers are wanting to see your work first hand.

The Color choices as was said earlier are a bit drab, and a drop down menu of options detailing your services.

For example

Web Site Design:

[Description of this service and what tools or features a site could have]

Logo and Corporate Identity;

[Description of these features or services available]

etc

Last thing Kay, I know your looking for this to be a local service, but if it's on the internet you might as well make it more accessible to any customer, and to do that you might want to choose a different back ground other then Illinois. However that is a business/economic personal choice and not really meant to be a critique.

it's not down

He's talking about the website on the portfolio. I'm doing database maintenance on it right now so I took it down.

Like I said, the site isn't advertised or by any means live, so I'm not worried about having it down.

http://i44.tinypic.com/2mmd4b5.png

That's how the images are currently supposed to render. I noticed that some browsers are fucking it up because they suck. Firefox is displaying it currectly. I'll fix it later.

Here's the test
http://browsershots.org/http://www.illiniwebdesign.com/

Firstly the color scheme is not bad.

1)I would get rid of that part about never receiving payment if dissatisfied. That is a terrible idea and people will try an rip you off all the time.

2) Id get rid of all the contact information off the main page and bundle that all under the contact area. You seem to be going for a "wholesome simplified" scheme, no need to make it noisy.

3)I always like breadcrumb navigation as well and perhaps a site map.

4)The text in the "our clients" section has no alignment.

5)Background colors on the tables have different colors in Explorer8 and Firefox.

6) Other Explorer8 issues, the our portfolio page is bunk. When you go to that page the left justifies the header image and the navigation bar seem to have right justification.

7) Also, if you want to keep the order of you navigation, the general convention seems to be to return to the "main" page of the site to be the left link. Could always just make the header graphic a link back to the "our company" section as well, something I really hate when people dont do on their sites.


Other than that looks very..clean which I like.

That's exactly what I was going for Ithkrul. Clean, simple, and a bit different with the colors.

I'm working through making it compatible in all browsers but it's very, very difficult. Internet Explorer is horrible. It gets like a 32/100 on the ACID test, whereas Safari gets a 98 and Chrome gets like 100.

Anyways, appreciate the comments.


edit: As far as the payments go, my policy is if you don't like the website, you don't pay. You don't keep the site, since I'm hosting it, you just are not obligated to purchase it. Some web design companies require payment up front or 50% payment up front, whereas I don't.

Well it is Internet Explorer 8 which is using the standard syntax. I know that most of us use Firefox and friends. But the masses use IE. Just stick to the pure standard CSS 2.1 and should be OK. Although I'm sure some stupid things will still arise.

I think that as far as the payment thing goes, the ability for your customer to communicate as well as your ability to communicate can make this is non-issue. Good requirements up front. Don't take shit from anyone!