Question

Topic: Website Critique

New Site Design For Surveygizmo (pre-testing)

Posted by Christian on 1/6/2009 at 4:00 PM ET 250 Points
Hi everyone,

We are going though a major revamp of our site and wanted to get your feedback on our new home page vs our old home page. It's a pretty radical redesign.

We are having 30-40 people come into the office in person in two weeks to test the sites in front of us, but I wanted to see if anyone had any immediate comments on the forums. (Hence I marked this as URGENT -- so we can act on your feedback before live test groups visit us.)

Old (Current) Website: https://www.surveygizmo.com

This is just a comp, but it's in a webpage format -- so don't expect the links to work! :)

New Design: https://www.surveygizmo.com/temp_design/

Thanks in advance for your insights! The web team is looking forward to all your comments!

Cheers,

-Christian Vanek
Co-Founder & CTO, SurveyGizmo
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Christian on 1/6/2009 at 4:45 PM Author
    Hi Kathleen,

    Yah, we wanted to minimize the distractions on the home page but inner pages do have a side navigation bar. We decided just to post the home page first.

    Thanks for your comments! I'll pass them on!

    Cheers,

    -Christian
  • Posted by Mikee on 1/6/2009 at 4:54 PM Accepted
    The new site is much cleaner. The original felt too cluttered. There was so much information that I did not know where to start reading.

    The new site addresses this well.

    As Kathleen pointed out, there is not really any navigation which makes it hard to know how easy it will be to use.

    One think I might change would be the empty space above "Stay updated". It is making the page a little longer than necessary. Now that I look at it more are all of the "links" at the bottom necessary or could the be accomplished through some sort of menu? This would shrink the page quite a bit.

    Overall the new design is appealing and a definite move in the right direction.

    Mike
  • Posted by Christian on 1/6/2009 at 7:18 PM Author
    Thanks all the comments have been interested. Here are a couple question we have.

    1) In regards to NuCoPro saying reduce the spacing and fonts. This was interesting to us. We have discussed and debated this. Obviously we are trying to balance readability (sometimes for older eyes) versus more content above the fold. Several of us have gone back and forth on more open and bigger fonts with more scrolling, or more condensed.

    Does anyone else have an opinion on that? We haven't found consensus yet.

    2) The links section at the very bottom of the page are honestly less for people and more for search engine optimization. The pages are real content be we are deep linking to hyper specific pages we want relevancy for.

    3) The Special Offers are sort of intentionally buried only to keep the main messages above simple. The idea we are hoping for is that if you have scrolled that far are the last we have to get you interested. Who doesn't love a sale? Do you think this works or backfires?

    4) Mikee you comment about the lack of navigation making you think our product might not be easy to use was insightful. What we are working hard to do is reduce choices you have make about where to go or what to do. So if you are interested in the Features section of the page there is one link. That's the idea anyways we were trying to explore. The inner pages would have a normal navigation. But you point was really interesting, can anyone else comment?



  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 1/7/2009 at 8:22 AM Member
    Instead of putting all the inner page links on the home page for search engines, put them on your site index page, and leave that link on your home page. It'll have a similar effect w/o cluttering the home page.

    I'd suggest moving the customers/users list off of your home page, and making that an inner page instead. It's not information that will be often referred to - just information that will be useful during the decision-making process.

    Your first bullet point, "So easy, yet ..." would be read stronger as "Easy, yet"

    I'm assuming that the page is basically a mock-up, and not intended for use as-is since there's no clickable/selectable text, etc.
  • Posted by Christian on 1/7/2009 at 12:20 PM Author
    Thanks everyone! Come take a look when it's live in about 2 weeks.

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