Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Anise,

My first impressions of your website are very favourable. I really like the grey/aqua colour scheme, and the restrained design.
The font size was not a problem for me. I did find it a little small at it's default size, but you can adjust that in most browsers. I think the grey colour of the body copy is a shade light.

I agree with Puru that the toolbar at the top of the page is unneccesary duplication. If you want to keep it, think about moving it to the bottom of the page, so you don't have to scroll back to the top of the page to get back to your primary navigation.

With regards to the navigation, I think it is perfectly clear. I think maybe having a "home" button in the navigation is a bit of overkill, especially as clicking your logo alway gets you home.

Content seems fine. However a lot of the copy is "About us", not written from a customers point of view. There are also a few spelling errors I have noticed, a real bug-bear of mine on websites! (easily fixed!)

Overall impressions, the site lacks a little 'personality'. There are no people pictures, nothing your customers can identify with. Your site ticks all the rational boxes, and few of the emotional ones.
Over all I think you could do with a few more pictures worked into the text to sustain interest. (you say yourself on your website that a picture is worth 1000 words), They could be duotones in the aqua/grey colours to sustain consistency.

I would also add interest to your site with the judicous use of animation, for instance the 3 boxes on your welcome page would work great as a mini flash movie.

Overall I think your site is very good - better than most, and only needs minor attention to make it excellent!

Lots of steak, but not much sizzle. The site needs some visual interest, color, and much less copy per page. Add some relevant photos, graphs, anything to break the monotony of all that gray copy. I looked at about 8 or 10 different pages and they all looked alike. I struggled to read everything, but finally gave up because it was just too much.

If you think someone might really want all of this text, let them download a .pdf. Don't make them click and scroll. They'll lose patience (as I did) and just move on to another site.

Hope this helps.

Sorry, haven't read any of the above before I wrote this.

Not much to say actually ... the size of the font is a little small for my liking, its easy to navigate.
Would expect the top three boxes to link to somewhere!

Maybe the top banner space is a little too big (height), but thts about it.

Nice site