new website - honest opinion required please

decided after a lot of issues to move from wordpress to a "normal" website

if you have five minutes to have a look and give me your honest opinion (good and bad) then i would be most appreciative

the web address is www.zodiacsecurity.co.uk

thanks

Just on the first page, it would not take a lot to make the images link as well, a minor thing but some people click on images rather than search for bits of text to click on.

Not sure about the blue phone number on the blue background.

Could the content be scrollable and leave the header in place?  So the contact info is alway on show.

Also, the Maintenance and repair picture is someone working on an electric panel but with no protective eyewear.  A minor thing but a potential client may think that this is a photo of one of your engineers.  Not sure but I thought it was best practice to wear protective eyewear when working?  The images are there to represent your business as well, so make sure they don't give the wrong impression.

The ^ and the <> buttons at the bottom of the screen have no indication about what they do.  At first I thought the ^ would hide the footer info or the social buttons or even open a contact page.

Personally, I would have preferred to see images of the work you do, not some stock images of people who don't know what a screwdriver is.  If you have fitted some access control then why not have a photo of it?

Might want to check your counties/towns as I have not heard of DOochester (on the access control page) You also need to check the fonts used as there are at least 2 fonts used in the list and some are bold.  Through the body of the main text I see around 2 fonts being used and a combination of formatting.  

Having multiple sections on the one page showing the areas you cover, waste of potential space for the reader.  I personally think it is more important to make your pages for the reader and not Google.

I do like it but the large section of counties etc... at the bottom takes up space that could be better utilised so you can increase the size of the text for the bits you really want people to read.

Hi!

I agree with Glenns' comments above. I note that on the Fire Alarms page, you have three separate sections where you tell visitors about where you operate!

From a copy viewpoint, there are some bloopers in the text, e.g. 'piece of mind', missing full stops etc. - the power of proofreading! However, with the bulk of the copy, the style you have chosen does not give your reader ways to easily find out the pertinent infomation. To paraphrase, you can't see the content for the words. Some sub-headings would help break up the text, and may be less important information/features could just be bulleted.

Hope this helps.

Hi, you want the opinion of Robert Keating or David Viniker on this. THese guys are great. Review your site in internet explorer (download the Goole tool bar first) and look at the 'G' symbol at the top...click on it and check out what Google reckons...speak to these guys to get more traffic your way and go up on web searches.

thanks for the feedback gents, really appreciated

more work required!!!

Hi Gareth,

Interesting that you have moved from Wordpress back to a static html site, most of my customers actually ask me for the opposite. What issues did you have exactly? The thing is, updating your site might be a bit of a headache in future although you could use something like cushyCMS to edit it.

That aside, overall the information that I would be looking for if searching for a service like yours is readily available, so that's a big plus. I'm not left wondering what your site is about (you'd be surprised how many I see that assume you know what the business is and leave you guessing). The telephone number is at the top and bold which is obviously a key element.

I did some tests on your contact form but it wasn't very user friendly. I tried each field at a time but the phone number asked for a surname in the alert popup. Also, I'd use a combination of PHP and JQuery for the alerts.

Also when I tried to submit a correctly filled out form there was no visual indication to say it had been submitted successfully. I'd say the contact page and form should be something to look at as a matter of urgency.

Overall though I would imagine this site will serve you quite well.

Can't add much to waht has been said above. the main thing that struck me was that the locatiosn where you carry out work do take up too much room. This makes the page too long in my opinion. Would a map do the job better? 

Few things I noticed:

• Only include keywords in your H1 headings (top level headings) which are relevant to significant content on your page e.g. on page security-for-property-developers.html you have an H1 (I'm talking HTML here) containing
  Burglar Alarms | CCTV | Access Control | Door Entry Systems | Fire Alarms | Wireless Alarms | Automatic Gates | Contact Us but there is no content (apart from your navigational links) on fire alarms on that page. Also H1 headings should be unique to the page and it is debatable whether you should have multiple h1s on a page. My recommendation is to have one h1 heading which is truly limited to what the page is about (and not stuffed with keywords) and then second level headings following it (H2s). Of course h3 for sub-sub headings can also be used (etc.). Structure it like you would a word document (h1 is the main heading etc.) The keywords you place in the headings are significant to Google if you do it well.
• The title of your Fire Alarms page (as per the HTML title attribute) is Fire Alarm installers | Wired | Radio | Wireless | Yeovil | aunton | Somerset | Dorset | Devon | London
  (I assume you mean Taunton)
• image ids in the code should be unique but are not e.g. img src="wpimages/wp9f07fb84.png" width="960" height="16" border="0" id="pic_1" name="pic_1" title="" alt="" onload="OnLoadPngFix()" usemap="#map1" on line 286 of maintenance.html page (pic_1 id reoccurs on page). Same problem for many other ids throughout the site. This will be a problem if you are use any of the duplicate ids as an anchor as you will only be able to point to the first one of the duplicates
• Your "Use persistent connections (keep alive):" is only 4/100 which is something you might want to look into (for your page to load efficiently).Keep Alive is to do with keeping the same TCP connection to handle multiple HTTP requests/responses, as opposed to opening multiple connections
• YOu may also want to consider implementing a (No max-age or expires) i.e. leverage browser caching of static assets (e.g. your .png and jpg files etc.) so that elements of your page stay in the local cache longer and thus your page loads more efficiently for frequent visitors to your site.

thank you, very grateful for your comments

HI Gareth,

Please don't use grey text. I've been appealing to every web designer, writer that I meet not to do this.  If you have dodgy eyesight like lots of the people Ii've worked with recently, it is soooo..... frustrating not to be able to see the text clearly.   

Regards,#

KATHIE

I can only comment as a user, I to find the gray text a bit of a strain.

It is hard to please everyone's eyes.

A point is not all the monitors and laptop screens used to view your site will be of the best quality.

The above I can comment on as I work with them all day. The people who make websites, may have the best gear and that type of text looks clear for them.

thanks once again, point noted about the grey text, i'll make it a darker grey

Hello

hello kate

Katie. Not Kate.

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