Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

The site looks very good!

One possible suggestion would be to add testimonials or big key account client lists. This would give more credit to your company/software.

I would put a product presentation link on the front page. There are a lot of people that just don't have the time to try it, but don't want to schedule a demo until they've had a chance to see it in action. Put up a 5 minute product overview and I think you'll see some pleasent results.

Hi there,

The site design looks good, however, the images seem to load slowly which may cause some visitors to immediately exit the site. Also, the site is missing basic search engine optimization techniques which may be hindering the site's performance. Otherwise, it looks good.

If you'd like to chat about how to increase your websites visibility, contact me via my website. You can find my website address in my profile.

thanks,

Patti Fousek

I think you should include a tagline or statement in the header that says WHAT you do and WHO you do it for -- so that just upon looking at the site, the visitor knows if they're part of the target audience. The homepage is pretty vague... business software, founded on relationships... I'm not sure upon first look what this actually means. Overall, I'd eliminate a lot of the adjectives and replace them with specific words that get to the point quicker. Some screen shots would be nice.

The most important goal for a business website is to generate LEADS and SALES. This starts with getting more traffice to your website from people who are looking for you in search engines, blogs, social media -- anywhere online.

Right now there are a bunch of basic Internet marketing factors you are not taking advantage of. Here is a free SEO and Marketing report about your website. You can start with the tips in that report. If you have more questions you can contact me directly through my profile.

Hello, mmcelyea

You see, at first the website looks OK, looks like lots out there. But sometimes it’s a good thing to be just one regular business website. So, the first impression is not bad. However, when you start to dig, you get the second impression.

The following is a designer’s look at the project. Please, try to accept what is about to being said. The observed mistakes may seem not important at first, but they do help to make an impression. Where your visitor not being a designer may not notice tiny details, however, he will notice inconvenient website and unclear message, he will also be able to experience poor constructed website and may make his own opinion about the business based on the website.

The first thins that is wrong about the design: it’s too blue. The blues are pretty bright and the shades of the same color are very close. There is not enough contrast, so in order to find the most important information about what you do, visitor has to peer into the layout to find what he needs. The bright red helps here, but not really. All you see is the word “Form” and a header “About Cross Form”. All the rest is just a big blue spot.

It’s also a bit sad, and the smiling guy doesn’t help a lot, because he and his disappearing desk are floating in an empty space giving an impression of a clerk Angel. I am kind of kidding, but there is truth in any joke. Look yourself. The guy with the desk is not linked to any particular block. He is also neither on the right side, nor in the middle; therefore he’s basically breaking a geometrical balance. On top of that the guy’s shadow acts as if it doesn’t belong. The desk also has no shadow whatsoever. In the end, both elements: the guy and the desk seem absolutely separate from each other. All people images on your website are floating in the air and having bad shadows, which brake all physics laws. Besides, png images are very heavy and take a lot of time to load. The bad thing is that there is a script or something to replace pngs in IE, where they do not show their transparency, but instead of loading gif images right away, the script allows to load pngs in IE, and you still can see that they are not transparent, and it also takes a lot of time, only after that transparent gifs are loaded and replace non-transparent pngs. Sad…

There are some more elements which don’t make sense. For instance, why would you need the central block with the product image and a slogan to be put in a box also floating in the air? I will also get back to it when I will be talking about SEO and the code of your project.

The main content block of the index page doesn’t make sense to me either. Reoccurring blocks tend to shift from page to page. Text blocks are aligned neither vertically, nor horizontally, looks like someone just threw them into the layout without thinking about the balance and have said, “Let them be”. So they are, but how… There are issues with empty spacing here and there: below the slogan blue block and the main content area, below the content area and “Latest News” block. GSA Schedule banner and the bottom info line are also not aligned. Do you think that you visitor will not notice it? You see, every thing which is not logical in the layout will force questions: is it supposed to be this way and if yes, then why? Visitor starts looking for answers, and doesn’t find any.

For instance, there is an empty space between the content part and a bottom part with news and such. Why is it empty? Is there supposed to be a banner I can’t see? Any important message which hasn’t downloaded for some reason?

There is a little confusion with menus. I have discovered five. Do you really need so many? There they are:

1. VAR LOGIN / CLIENT LOGIN
2. Schedule Demo/ Try it!
3. Products / Services / Markets / Partners / Company / Help Center / Contact Us
4. Restaurant/Retail / Property Management / Government / Oil & Gas / Healthcare / More Markets.
5. About CrossForm / Work Order Management / Field Service Management / Asset Management / Vendor Management / Inspections Management

This is really confusing! The fourth menu inherits the design of a fifth menu. The fifth menu disappears. Every section of the third menu has its own submenu, and eventually you get lost in the information without knowing how you got to the section. There is no clear structure of the website content.

Usability suffers in many ways on your website. You don’t have as much information on any of your pages, not so bad graphics is really badly used, navigation system is very confusing, you force visitor making unnecessary steps iin order to get to the information, you basically hide information from your customers.

There is also a huge issue with SEO and content appearance on your website. The main problem is that the most important content parts, such as a product name, slogan, and some menu items are replaced with images (by the way with no image size featuring) and those images are not supplied with the alt text. This is one of the most terrible mistakes in web-design.

Here you may find a printout of your main page, which has to have both product name and a slogan: https://www.artographica.com/clients/crossform.pdf. As you can see, it’s lacking both. The printout has no information about your product, and if before you just were confusing your visitors while they were still able (with great difficulties) to navigate your site, now you really start hurting your business.

There is no meta tag for a project description, there are five non informative keywords phrases, which is really not enough. As I mentioned, there are no alt tags for the images, even where they have to be present.

I am sorry for being so harsh, it’s very sad to work on something for a long time and in the end get a product which is hardly usable and definitely hardly online marketable. I am sorry to say that, I just wanted to help.

Natasha Chernyavskaya.