Quick review wanted please!

Which one do you prefer?

http://helpful101.com

or

http://1a26z.com

Would you pay for one of them?
If so how much (imagining it's completed) ?

Look forward to your replies!
Thanks

 

The first one is better. The price could not be estimated yet, because you are serving design look, while others might only conside domain and PR to buy.

 

Thanks
As for price, it's for a client, I'm doing all the SEO and what have you, but right now I'm just after like a base price.
I'm thinking at least $350 - $500? They pay for own hosting and domain name.
Price too much? Too litte, etc?

 

Hi, I also liked the first entry.

I think I'd pay $400-$550 but still can increase if the PR of the page high and testimonials are good and overwhelming I think I can spend more than just that.
Nice visuals, Good Job!

Cheers

 

AWESOME! Glad to hear you think it's worth that plus a little Thanks man!
Guessing you also would have seen it with a full header? Before it looked a bit tackier and unfinished, but now it's really starting to get there...thanks to photoshop hahaha
Thanks bro, reading that has just put a huge smile on my face
Thanks again!

 

I don't know who came up with the idea bout design because it just sucks. It looks cleans but colors for header and footer looks two thousand and late.
Sorry for breaking this for you but it is not you can show to people today. There are some clients who still order such designs and they are happy about it but most people will find it rubbish.

 

Thanks for the reply mate
But what design are you talking about?
http://1a26z.com
or
http://helpful101.com
or both of them?
I need to know what site you meant before I can ask what you thought was rubbish about it.
Thanks

 

I was checking the 101 website. Don't like these buttons and footer color. It is nice and clean but something isn't right. Different colors and shadows could make it look better.

 

Helpful101 is better. The second one is godawful, even though the woman's prettier.

As far as buying goes, I wouldn't buy because I can install WP and a theme and write a couple of thousand words myself. With that said, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of individuals who would pay for the site but I suspect you'd have to include support in the deal (especially at $500) because you're not going to sell that layout to anyone who knows what they're doing. It sounds cruel but you'll get more money from a complete ditz than you will from someone who's web-savvy.

Alternatively, figure out the price on hours. If it took you 5 hours to build, charge them for 5 hours.

Oh, and you need to check your copy: there are mistakes in the text (and you might want to check that the client really wants to sound chummy and potentially unprofessional).

 

Thanks for getting back to me
The client wanted a light pink/cream-ish/pale color palette. Perhaps if I made the text in front of the pink a different color, like blue? But then it looks even tackier... :/ I've played around with the shadows a whole bunch and am just trying to find the right combination. As for the footer color, well I agree, something's wrong. I'm thinking of making it darker like a lot of footers, or more like the top banner/header (flowers and creamy). Though the menu color I'm happy with, it's what the client has basically decided on, though if you suggest another color scheme I'm more than happy to try it and see what they think. Was it the pink background color or the text color or both you didn't like about the menu?
I actually also wonder whether the background color/pattern should be changed to a really dark navy bluish-black. This way it draws the eyes directly to the content area. My problem with solid colored backgrounds is it makes them look unprofessional if not done properly. Thoughts on that?
Thanks again for getting back to me, it's really appreciated

Hey mate, firstly thanks for taking the time to reply with useful comments, it helps and is truly appreciated.
Fair enough you wouldn't pay for this website, but what if you installed, for someone who isn't tech savvy, WP and make/buy theme for it, plus configuring hosting/DNS/etc. How much would you charge them for that?

As for the layout, what exactly is wrong with it? Colors? Background? Lack of banner spots? Etc? You just said I'm not going to be able to sell the layout to anyone who knows what they're doing. Could you further a little on that for me please? For instance if it's not the desgin/colours then are you meaning lack of a CMS? Poor html/css? What would you change about the layout? Lets say it was turned into a WP theme, then would the layout still be unsellable? I'd really appreciate if you could further on what you mean?

The copy is the funny part. Just curious as to what mistakes you found/where the client sounds chummy? Because the client has written a lot of her own parts. I had written good quality SEO content and then the client was like, just write this. Right now I'm trying to get her to email me back the seo I had orginally written with changes she would like as oppossed to keeping her content on the pages. Trying to get her to understand seo is pretty important and turning out to be fun
Would you keep the descriptive boxes on each page just under the menu, or get rid of them and just jump straight into the content? Is that the part that sounds unprofessional?

Thanks heap for replying mate, I'd love if you could get back to me again

 

I'd probably work it out on the hours spent on it. That's always the best way to figure prices, IMHO, rather than trying to compare to other people/companies about whom it's hard to find any useful info! (How good they are, etc.) Given that you have the client already, it's also a very fair way to calculate the cost and - since it's an ongoing thing you can measure - you can always give them a heads-up if it's taking longer than you thought.

There's nothing wrong with it as such. There are still people who use TwentyTen and think it's great (and it is, in a way). My comment about "anyone who knows what they're doing" was not so much a negative (my apologies if I sounded like a major downer) but more an "if someone's familiar with WP and the amazing stuff you can do with it, there's a good chance they're going to want something way cool and funky".

It's the difference between IT people and non-IT people, if you see what I mean. A non-IT person will assume that what they're getting is great because an IT person gave it to them. An IT person will expect it to be totally awesome and demand more. That's a generalisation, of course, but I hope you see what I mean. Kinda like trying to sell your services as a wedding photographer to a photographer or artist is more difficult than selling them to a layman like me.

So, to put it more clearly - and purely IMHO - a non-IT person, non-Internet-savvy, non-designer will like it because it's clear, clean, shows what they want shown and is easy to navigate. These are all plus points to anyone, of course. A design-savvy person who spends most of their time online will be disappointed that it doesn't have sliders, featured content, a funky background, a unique layout, etc. Most of which doesn't matter to someone just trying to present their business which has nowt to do with design.

So, to put it succinctly (and without going off on yet another tangent), chances are the client will like it because it's clean and clear. The other design was just fugly.

Examples:

"Congratulations on your forthcoming wedding or [a] special day of celebration."
"someone that can [help] make your marriage legal."
"With unlimited assistance I can help create your dream wedding day." - this means they have to give unlimited assistance to the Celebrant, not the other way around.
"you will find me easy to approach and with a friendly personality and totally committed to providing a warm, loving and professional service." - messy, needs reformulating so it means what it says.
"Either way, what better way to say you're still so in love than public[ly] or privately renewing your vows." - bizarre italic at the end.

Those are just pulled off the front page in a couple of minutes. They're not all necessarily mistakes like spellings, though there are plenty of those as well.

The chummy part is extremely visible in things like "If you intend to marry the only you love uncondtionally, well I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unfortunately there are some legal papers we'll need to go over. Some will even require a few signatures." - which sounds absolutely awful. All it needs is a "hur, hur" and a smiley at the end to be worse. Or "What a special time in history it must be." in the baby naming section on the front page.

But - and it's a significant "but" - the humour DOES work in other places (like the "walking on broken glass" bit in "Renewing Vows Ceremony" on the front page.

There's nothing wrong with being friendly but she needs to walk the line between friendly/funny and being someone who the reader smiles a pain-filled, long-suffering smile for.

Humour is a very difficult thing to manage in business. As a rule of thumb, only use it when it's a false negative: like the broken glass thing. It's a joke because the whole purpose of the lady's job is celebrating joy, the common view of marriage is a "ball and chain" setup (even though everyone assumes it's actually joyful at the same time) and it's obviously a joke. The "signatures" humour doesn't work because it implies that the reader is an idiot because they don't know that. The baby naming one sounds too sarcastic (too easy to read as: "oh, how important to the world your baby is" *eye roll*).

I really liked those, actually. It makes things a bit clearer for someone like me, who's never heard of a Celebrant before and has no clue what they do. With the wide pic below them to separate from the testimonial and contact info, it works very well.

Oh, a couple of other thoughts:

1. Contact info should probably be clickable at the top (the email). I know it'll get spammed but it's really important (and I'd do it through a contact page - Contact Form 7 plugin works wonders for that, with drop-down lists of subjects and stuff). It's important that the contact info be up top on the page AND that it's easy to get to AND that it's really visible (more than the "contact me" on the menu bar) - that is, after all, the primary purpose of the page.

2. I'd switch the "About Me" and "Contact Me" menu option positions. "About Me" is usually the last thing people worry about, although it can certainly be a clincher in personal services (so keep it!).

No worries. Hope it helps. As they say, "Those who can, do; those who can't, become editors like me..."

 

Its definitely worth a five hundred