Mobile Website Design Company site is done! Noble Warriors, please review :)

looks great, but i would change the text font to something more special....

Hi Kyle,

First of all I would make it be responsive... Make it full screen. Usually layouts that use different colors like yours do are supposed to be full screen (so you divide the sections better). Lose the the slidedeck icon... it looks unprofessional to use a free version on a sales site. Lose the neon green on the headline. Make the boxes nicer. They're quite boring right now.

In fact... sorry for this (I respect your work and desire but I also respect time and I believe in giving out honest opinions)... but I would change the whole design to something else. Something cleaner, looking more like an apps site (clean landing page) with straighter flow and less "click twice" paths.

Hope it helps. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Alex

It's looks pretty good so far, but I agree with Kyle I would make it responsive. The first thing I tried doing was resizing my browser and... nothing happened (I don't know how many other people will try this, but personally every time I see a page that says "responsive" I have to resize my browser window to see what it does). So I broke out my mobile browser and saw that I did get redirected to a mobile site which was good, and it looked good in the browser. I didn't try out the click to call but I think that's a good idea to have right there at the top.

I also agree with the slide deck icon, being it's a different color it pops right out at you. I would either get rid of it or switch to a different slider if you want to keep the slider.

The neon green headline looks a bit weak, the color of it is fine because it matches with the bars in your title/logo but it's just so narrow maybe try bolding it?

The bottom part of the page looks fine except for the links, maybe change them to more of a button? But right now when you hover on them they turn white and disappear into the background.

Lastly the main menu, I would personally get rid of the text decoration on the links there.

Hope this helps.

Edit: Oops, I forgot about the WordPress tracking smiley I think it would make your page look more professional if you hide that little guy.

Thanks to Alex for some great pointers via Skype. Good guy

Any other suggestions? I'm really digging deep here, guys! I need to get this thing into tip top shape for next week.

To those lurking, stop in and say hi.

Kyle

Greetings,

I like your base colors...

If you are going to use CSS3 techniques, try and get them across the browser board or feed a different sheet for these styles. - looks diff in IE.

Try:
CSS3 support in Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8

Or:
CSS3 PIE: CSS3 decorations for IE

Running Multi IE copies are a pain, I do like the new tool Superview:
Expression Web SuperPreview

That or BrowserLab from Adobe is handy:
https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html


I would work the menu out a bit more, I as well don't like the text-decoration.. Maybe some tabs on roll over to match the logo? just a thought.


The textures are ok I reckon, I would suggest you start using transparency images along with your BG color, that way when you decide to change the color, you only have to change the bg color and not images.. Just a suggestion



The slider:

Might check into FlexSlider: "A responsive slider"

- WP - Flex Slider
- Demo - http://flex.madebymufffin.com/

Please note that I have not used the WP, just the Jquery Plug and it's solid.

There is also another here I am quite fond of:
wmuSlider, a jQuery responsive slider ~ Brice Lechâtellier

His site has a bit of info to get you on your responsive journey also.



Responsive Frameworks:

I have not worked with the HTML5 Boilerplate as of yet..


I have worked with a few others and do enjoy some of them...


On the WP side of things:

I am actually having a good time with helping someone style out this responsive theme:

Skeleton WordPress Theme

I also enjoy the WP Whiteboard framework:

Whiteboard Framework for WordPress | Learn How to Use WordPress

Either of those should do nicely if you are wanting to knock a responsive WP site out.

I would probably get the responsive structure in play and design from there as you will find it a whole lot easier.


Best of Luck to you in 2012,

FBM.

Kyle,
Overall, I like the colors for the site; very soothing, but maybe TOO soothing? A little more contrast would make it pop more.

A few thoughts for you. If it were my site, I would:

1. Make the tiny font (especially that in the navigation) larger.
2. I don't mind the accordion (I have a web company and we use it on our own site as well.. dreamscapemultimedia.com.) however, the logo in every slide of the accordion is unnecessary and wastes real estate. (We've done this too, in the past.) If you want the logo on every slide, I might make it smaller and place it in a lower corner to leave room for my next suggestion..
3. Find some decent smiling faces at istock.com and put a few smiling humans on your homepage to personalize it.
4. Testimonials?
5. Your portfolio is blank. Hide it from the navigation until it's ready. Don't make your visitors waste their clicks.
6. Graphics are too small on mobile-website-design. Better: make the site examples large enough to take up the whole column and stack them above one another instead of side-by-side.
7. You're using a serif font (Times) for your copy; that's a no-no on the screen. San-serif (like Arial, Veranda, Tahoma, etc.) for screen reading, serif fonts for print (if you like). San-serif is easier to read when looking at a screen.
8. You'll want captcha on that contact form.
9. You can get rid of the notes under the common contact fields like "Please enter your First Name." They're just clutter as most folks know what to do with a contact form these days.

Hope this helps!
Matt

If your doing responsive ignore the advice above and don't even bother supporting the old browsers even more so i.e6 and 7...

Right

1. Site took a life time to load and I'm on 100mb cable, not good if I want to view it from a mobile.

2. The site isn't even responsive as mentioned above, so there is one massive fail from your entire business plan / name.

3. Your slider does not work properly it stops just before it reaches the previous tab.

4. You got way to many design styles going on pick 1 and stick with it, the colours are off and the entire site is very very flat nothing appealing about it.

5. Ditch the underline on the button there is no need for them with all the other hover effects you got going on.

6. The banner you have once you get into the site is just plain tatty and reverts back to my previous point, if so many people are searching online using smart phones your site does not even come into consideration.

7. Prices are off again it all comes back to get your own product to do the sell, no point selling a service you can't do your self.

Prices have you actually sat down and worked out how much you need to live each month?

If that was me I would need $3000 myself to live pay all the bills, food and so on. That means I would need to sell 10 of your basic sites per month. Do you think I can do that as a new business? Sell 10 each month every month?

8. No number to call, your selling click to call yet most people have no idea what that is. You do not even offer it on your own site!

9. Your site does not even validate.... :/

I think you need to go back to the drawing board on this, have a rethink and come up with a new plan

wow..... looks awesome to me!

Thanks a ton for the feedback! Nice to wake up to some real criticism.

To start, there's some REAL misconception with "Responsive". You guys are referring to a technique in web design...this is the name of my company. My customers (business owners in the service industry) will not attempt to resize their browser to see if I'm "Responsive". I appreciate the concern but I'm not that worried about it.

Also, if you would like to view my site on a mobile device, type the URL in. It will display the mobile version which is running my custom CMS. The redirect is live.

Thanks to all the honest opinions. I'm sifting through them and creating a list of changes to make.

That aside, have a great day everyone

Kyle

Hey Kyle,

Whilst you have some changes to consider, I think the site fundamentally is awesome. Sure, its not the finished product just yet but you have a solid foundation on which to build a viable business.

I noted some points made above, and I do not doubt for a second that its anything but sound advice. However looking at your site from the perspective of a business owner in the service industry, aka your potential customers, firstly I wouldn't know what SlideDeck is. So the giveaway logo wouldn't really grab my attention. Secondly, that goes for the smiley Wordpress tracker as well. What impact those things would have on sales overall? I'm guessing, probably not at all, but Alex and Tweakr almost certainly know more about this than I do. And still worth consideration definitely.

I only say this because when I build a site I always try to look at it from the site visitors' point of view and not that of crack commando website designer

I know you're gonna have a lot of success with this any which way, the service industry is a great market!

Jordy

Hi.

Your site look very interesting, but it really takes a little too much time to load.

But the layout/theme is good, if i haven't seen the source wouldn't believe it was running on WordPress.

One suggestion:

What you have hidden in Services\Mobile Website Design, should be in the home page - it's the most clear message to one may want to know how hist site look now on mobile / how could/should look.

One question:
For the images i guess you are using jQuery mobile for the mobile layouts. May i ask what you are using for CMS? Did you created some specific CMS ou you are using WordPress to for the mobile sites cms'


Thanks and keep up the good site.