Greetings!
Taylor asked me to do a personal review in a private chat, I wanted to post here though, so YES its a long read, however many of you will find my information useful so here you go: Taylor, enjoy, cheers on the praise
Thank you for your kind words. I am on your site right now. Ok overall I'd give it an 8. Your colors and layout are comfortable to the eye. Its called the web, and these are web PAGES. Meaning only difference from traditional publishing is that its on screen. What I'm saying is its supposed to read/function like a magazine/publication. Yours does good job. The other difference is that the web allows for great fluctiation with creativity, and dynamics with interactivity, meaning there is ample room to hook your 'readers' or viewers mind you. We as humans act on our senses. Text is there, we read. Pics are there, we look. Audio is there, we listen and quickly decides whether we want to hear, look at or read whats in front of us. I feel that your site could use a little umph.... It IS a techie type site, not requiring WOW factor or too many images. However I feel that you have some room to introduce a format with colors, and add some images, be it small, or your own custom Bullets, or colored headers.
Your heaer is not bad. Though the colors are too nuetral, and the fade there looks great but a little ameture. how would I improve it? HMmmmm. Again you want this to be both your name, and a shape/glyph/interesting icon for the public to remember you by, with more than just a name. You have nice letters as initials. I would propose CTS. maybe lay them out beside eachother with contrasting colors and fonts. Or try to play one of the letters, maybe make cTs (c lower case T capital s lower case, and bring the top of the T left and right over the other letters. Then write the full name underneath it with small tight letters. Try using arial bold for the samll letters. You may find that now you have some room to play with beside the logo, perfect spot to at least add a few images. so if they are in the header, you will have imaging on each page. Maybe make the header image rotate like a banner spot, create some buzz with more than the obvious text. You will soon find that you CAN use this rotating image as a banner, to pages within your site. (You can put a 'SPECIALS HERE' or something, which would tease them to your pricing page or so. Images play an equally important part as text for humans to communicate with. Ok, what would be better-Having a paragraph to describe something? Or a few pictures, with some text calls to action in there? The pic would depict a visual, and the user would relate, and understand. The text would give verbal description, leaving the other end to his/her imagination to 'picture it', so with our case here, you can use and should use BOTH! lol, long point sorry. I like detail.
Colors: I thing even if you made the button colors one of the creamy colors spotted in the logo (a lighter one) it would tie the site in a bit. Then as headers i.e. 'google looses top executive' could also use a color treatment, though a darker version of the creamy color, cause the buttons are over black, so they need a light contrasting color, and vice versa over white for header texts/titles.. My best advice to any webdesigner, is to look at books. A variety of them from straight text novels, to upscale ad filled magazines. Essentialy focus more on commnicating with humans through their basic senses, and use formats that work well in either print, or elsewhere on the web. Its NOT important to WOW your audience as much as it is to give them what they are there for, communicate!! Changing subtle things like text colors will greatly improve heavy reads, which your site looks like! Lighten the look of the read up with some images to space relevant text, and some lighter titles.
Borders. Overall good job. I would say that you should not make it look like there is something above the top of the web page. Either round your top left/right corners, or stop that fade at the header, and introduce a new bar for the header. Kinda tricky but your site currently has a lot of attention to those borders, my eye fights a bit to stay focused on the text. I would recommend to again pick a cream color, and or lighten up your current color by 60-70%.
http://www.customtailoredsolutions.com/about.php I know its hard sometimes but try to avoid so much white space on the bottom. Picture a mazine doing that?! Consider it valuable real estate that you should be filling, or not showing at all! Even go to putting 'place your ad here' ppl will see some value there at least.
I've looked at two pages so far, and can't help but remember less about what you do, and most about backpain relief, yuour only image and ad/affiliate on the page... redundant note, but you need to communicate to those that like to see pictures equally. seems like romper room when I type that, but believe me, it WILL bring life to your site!! Even 1 pic in your header that is well placed/chosen for your brand positioning in this market.
Footer: You NEED to finish off your sites footer. You need to make it look like: Ok I'm at the end, now what? Make sure you have your main links on the bottom of the page, and or a 'top' button, MAKE SURE YOUR audience is not scrolling when they do not have to. MAKE SURE you keep your important pages linked to eachother through every page, in multiple instances if you are scrolling.
Ok, I think I covered it. Follow these steps and I think you'll find your users will be able to both navigate and be comfortable with the way you commincate with them. Add some pictures and its gravy. **Last note, I see that you are preserving your space for your readers, however intrducing a 468x60 banner into your header would bring up the value, and you can network with ppl that would find your affiliates/banners useful rather than selling the spot to irrelevant audiences, or irellevant service offerings i.e. you could put a banner linking to your new special vs a banner to some pig farm website that you talked into buying the spot
ALl my best, hope you enjoyed my hour long review. I'm including links to some of the operations I own, all of which operate on keen design comminications, through many audiences and design styles/levels, explore and cherry pick whats relevant to yours, and how to improve it.
Cheers,
Norb Czufis
NC Media
http://www.ncmedia.ca
http://www.websocials.com
http://www.corplance.com
