Hi all, It's a short page.... sort of a combination squeeze page/sales page.... Could you give me your first impressions? http://www.thebestinternetmarketingcourse.com Thanks Cliff Michaels
it's a little busy near the top, but I like it. There's a typo in the title you may want to fix - "the best internet marketingc ourse"
Thanks for spotting that yize....... busy? hhhmmmm I'll see what I can do... especially if others concur. Thanks again Cliff
The first thing I notice is that my eye skipped straight to the second line, "A Web Business Explained" instead of starting at the top. Not sure if that's constructive or not. Honestly though, I can't find too much to complain about. I like the call to action locations and the metadata that makes it feel like a blog post. There is a lot of information, but at least I don't have to scroll down very far to get to the bottom. The only other feedback I have is to redo the colors a bit. What I do with my sites is checkout colourlovers.com and see what color palettes I like, and then use those colors in my designs. That way you have some sweet color schemes already made for you that you just plug into your CSS.
mneodor87, when you say "redo the colors a bit"... which, or what about the existing colors either bother you, or you feel need changing? Thanks again Cliff
I guess I'm not a fan of gray and black and red with yellow Here are more details around how I use CLs. Check out colourlovers.com/web/trends/websites/7857/Box where they break down all of the colors used in Box.net's theme. You could then apply those to your website- have the background be the #FFFFFF (white) and #E9F2F9 (light blue) gradient instead of using a gray gradient/tiled background. Then, make the color of the forms one of the other two lightish blue colors, and save the darkest blue (#3C8DC5) for your text, probably your h1 (title) text. For the other headings and text use either black or one of the other blue colors if the dark blue feels overused. Basically you redo the site colors/template to align with a professional site's design, basically for free Does that help?
Thanks mneodor - appreciate your time..... and will experiment with what you've suggested....... Anyone else feel the same about my colors..... or colors in general? Thanks! Cliff
Auto-playing video with the absurdly painful delay on the slide-in to shut it the *** up needs a giant axe swung at it... Nothing like pissing off the user before they even pay attention to your content. Header is way too large, fixed width layout is too big for my netbook and too small for my desktop, falling apart miserably and not fitting on the screen once zoomed... something is causing the border to flicker while scrolling, possibly some broken or incorrectly applied CSS. If this is a new site, the use of a tranny doctype is basically saying to the world the code is in transition from 1997 to 1998; not exactly bleeding edge development methods. It appears to be built using presentational images in the markup, non-semantic markup, absolute positioning of elements that have no business not being in flow, inaccessible forms (thanks to that stupid malfing AWeber BS) -- it's "yet another" laundry list on how NOT to build a website... hence the 28 validation errors (which in tranny means you don't have HTML, you have gibberish), and 33.9k of markup to deliver a mere 2.7k of plaintext and MAYBE 5 or six content images and one object... basically three times the HTML that should be used. It has nothing remotely resembling header navigation, proper document structure, semantic markup, images off or css off graceful degradation, or any of the dozen other things that are key in terms of accessibility. You've got massive slab fixed-size background images building the layout instead of letting flow do it's job -- worse you have TEXT that only exists as images, meaning search engines, screen readers, and people who block images due to bandwidth restrictions or caps basically aren't going to see anything -- just what off the shelf 'tool' did this? "XARA HTML filter" -- no clue what that is... actually I do know what it is -- another rubbish WYSIWYG that tricks people into THINKING they can make a website; the end result often being very pretty, but ultimately useless on anything other than the magical combination of screen size and OS the person who painted it together happened to be on. In a lot of ways I'd say said page reeks of the "but I can do it in Photoshop" mentality -- which has exactly two things to do with accessible useful websites -- and Jack left town, took his **** with him. That it vomited it up as windows-1252 character encoding pretty much says all we need to know about it... Probably their "Webdesigner MX" which is basically same thing as Dreamweaver or the artist formerly known as frontpage -- only thing about them that can be considered professional grade tools are the people promoting their use. Total page size is also MASSIVE -- 576k is ridiculous for that, but even more of a worry is it being built from 76 separate files. Handshaking ALONE that's anywhere from 12 seconds to a full minute just ASKING for the files, much less downloading them. (and anything more than 5 seconds is considered 'bad'). Though at least your description meta actually seems to try and use that for what it's actually FOR... the keywords could use a trim though since it's keyWORDS, not keysentences, not keyphrases, keyWORDS -- 7 to 8 single words with 100% relevancy to the content of the page, preferably totalling less than 128 bytes. Basically you've drawn a pretty picture of a website using broken outdated methodologies, instead of actually building a website.
Well, what can I say? Oh, I know... holy crap, I didn't understand 95% of that. I DID understand the part about the axe to the video though. But, never-the-less, I'm glad you liked it! I know...I know... I asked for a serious critique of this site... and you're assessment and critique is very much appreciated... I think? Now... I'm trying to figure out where the heck do I go with this? I must say, even though I didn't understand it, I 'think'... I'm very impressed, I was fascinated reading it. I loved it—sort of reminded me of my first Spanish lessons. Dumb me, I just thought I created a simple squeeze page offering something of value I believe 'some' folks could possible use. But obviously I've done it wrong. All those opt-ins received from it over the last 4 weeks are now probably no damm good. I guess I should remove them off my list. I will notify them that the site was done all wrong, and that they opted-in through that "stupid malfing Aweber BS" thingy. I might even send them your response to me as an explanation. At least that would clear it up for them. Do ya think? I do, appreciate, and thank you for taking the time to critique it, and the advice on what I could do to make things better. Oh, wait, you didn't offer any advice. Or, did you? Maybe it was in there somewhere... I'll read it again. deathshadow... you have a special gift, a gentle way of offering criticism and help, getting right to the point. Never loose that—don't ever change. It's a rare chosen few that have such powerful communication skills. The obviousness of your high intelligence and knowledge in this area, along with your communication skills, might be construed by some as abrupt, with a whole bunch of arrogance ego attached, sounding at times like a lunatic off on a rage. But they would be wrong. If they do not 'get you', it would be their problem. But I get you... I really do... Thanks again - Have a great day - and continued success to you. Cliff