Wanting to get some opiniions on my company's current website. I know it needs an overhaul. Any suggestions? www.klhindustries.com
Here are some of my suggestions: 1) Purple is not a good color choice for this. I would go with green or blue. 2) The top navigation is right aligned which looks poor on high resolution screens. It should be moved closer to the left. 3) I like the circular navigation but it should do more than just display a small div with a little bit of text when hovered over. 4) The center circular image is cut off on the outer radius of the circle and needs to be fixed. 5) Complete Project Management should be expanded by default because you have enough room in the left navigation. 6) The KLH logo should be redone. It looks very 1980s. 7) Change "toll free" to "Call Now Toll Free"
Great advice... thanks! I would like to also have some more "call to action" type links, like submit an RFQ or request for work type stuff.
I like the little hover menu idea, but I'm not digging the purple. Maybe add more colors to break it up?
It's ugly, but I love it. I hate these new fashioned websites with big bold colors and graphics that try to impress you. Give me a header, give me the text that I need to read below it and I'm happy. Good on the eyes and it's neat and organized. Blank white sites are back in.
http://www.klhindustries.com/why.htm -- example of what I'm saying. Simple, organized, gets the job done perfectly.
I agree with jlfrank21. I'm not a fan of the purple, or the logo but I do love the why.htm page. Right away, my eyes go to the content which is why someone is on your site to begin with! Not to mention, the header doesn't take up half my screen causing me to scroll down just to see a paragraph of text. I think if you just make some cosmetic changes, you'll be fine.
Unlike the others, I see nothing wrong with the purple. Color of royalty, nothing wrong with it. What makes it wrong is the undersized fonts in the header and footer ending up effectively illegible because of how purple interacts with white - something that dynamic fonts in a larger default size would help alleviate. One big thing I'd change is get rid of that 'wheel' of navigation nonsense. The text in the center of the wheel is also illegible because of the lack of contrast and the oversized gradient, and in general something that's really something working against you on this site is none of the pages feel like they have a consistant navigation. The solid bars could stand to be spruced up, even if it was just simple rounded corners, cut-outs or stand-outs. Likewise the company logo needs to be better integrated into the page as where it sits now looks more like a rendering error than intentional placement. That REALLY should be worked into your header bar somehow - being that what the site is about, in this case the company, should be the FIRST thing on the page. Something else I would suggest is ease up on the tracking scripts. They slow page loads, generally show you information that should already be available to you through your server logs, and frankly, THREE of them? Pick one, to hell with the rest. Likewise the current page is script heavy when I see NOTHING on ANY of the pages that even warrants the use of javascripts. You've got the outdated mm_swap nonsense, multiple stylesheets for no good reason, no media types, etc, etc... ... and REALLY, increase the font sizes to something someone over the age of 30 can actually READ.
Funny, just saw someone on another forum posted a piece of research showing that while we keeping thinking of "old people who need larger fonts", it turns out teenagers (a targeted demographic for many websites if maybe not this one) think tiny fonts suck. They gave pretty much steady negative comments over tiny fonts, despite the fact that many (most?) designers seem to think unreadable fonts are teh rawkz (or at least professional-looking).
You mean teh roxxors. Not too suprising, there's a reason books for preschoolers have HUGE letters, and why the 'larger' font used in many modern books is still called 'junior reader' print. (as opposed to novel print or novella which is even smaller - anyone else notice this? That 'novels' today are more like double-sized pamphlets?) You get it coming and going - kind of like life in general. As Jeff Foxworthy joked about his kids AND his parents, he's got two coming out of diapers and two going into them.
Typo, I meant Teh R0x0rz : ) That young children prefer larger letters I've seen all over the place along with the seniors like big letters thing and the dyslexics like bigger letters thing (and not with a super-high contrast either) but the teenagers one surprised me (even though when I was a teen I didn't care for microscopic fonts and had decent vision). Think about it, you're going back in time. Losing your hair and teeth, needing to be bathed, babbling and drooling...
I think part of it comes down to monitors now a days. A few years ago, all there was for monitors were the old 14" and 15" CRT 800x600, 1024x768 and for some 17" 1280x1024... 10 and 12 px fonts showed up fine. Now with larger and higher resolution and wide screen monitors, it's harder to see those font sizes becaues they appear to be so small so people opt for larger fonts just so they are able to see them. One person that emails me quite often has his content font set at 18px and on my monitor it looks huge. But he has a 30" LCD with high resolution so on his monitor, it looks normal. But the people of an older generation still use those old CRT monitors.
I must be a bit of a freak then, as I, and most of the older people I know have been running 1024x768 or higher since windows 3.1 Though for the most part those people use the large fonts/120dpi setting in windows. If 800x600 is comfortable at small fonts on a montor, 1024x768 looks a million times better with large fonts - especially in the age before font smoothing. Though I'm looking at my (relatively) new 24" envision LCD, and it's native resolution is 1920x1200 - in terms of DPI at that resolution it is almost identical to the 1600x1200 I run on my two 21" CRT's. I cannot concieve of running that LCD at small fonts - at least not at it's native resolution (and we all know how badly LCD's blow chunks at lower resolutions), and on all three displays (on the same machine) sites with anything smaller than 12px fonts are effectively useless - THANKFULLY 99% of major commercial websites use dynamic metric fonts because they actually bother to FOLLOW accessability guidelines like the WCAG, or have responded to accessability complaints... the noteworthy exceptions being the forum software phpBB who have always had a raging hardon for 8px and 9px fonts - god knows why. (every time I see 8px I go 'what is this, 1991?') Admittedly I'm not the average user, but with 15" laptops coming down the pipe with 1440x900 displays (my 3 year old HP for example), 13" laptops with 1280x800 displays (the base model macbooks and the macbook air), anything smaller than 14px is increasingly just made of /FAIL/... and you can avoid the problems in most cases by just using %/em for content - or even PT. Actually makes me wonder how in the devil people even use the 17" Macbook pro - that 'tiny' display at a resolution equivalent to my 24" LCD? On an OS that doesn't even have the ability to change the default size of the fonts? Admittedly they're sitting a hell of a lot closer, but not THAT much closer. Basically, the settings I've been using for two decades are now reaching the mainstream - which is why M$ moved the large fonts/120 dpi setting to the tasks panel on the personalize page in Vista, instead of burying it under advanced.
You are a geek and your friends are freaky geeks. All the older people I know (and for some reason I gravitate to that age group-- my youngest friends are my age but most of them are in their 60s and 70s) have old shit. They bought it once a long time ago and that's what they've got. Granted, not a one of them are geeky in any way, and most of them also have very small televisions (and no, they don't see them too well). Of course this might also be because my friends tend to be poor and when they get money they spend it on other things : ) My father-in-law bought a notebook with decent resolution and though I seee him squinting he hasn't changed the resolution at all. Though it might be because it hasn't occurred to him that he can change them.
That's actually a very good point. I'm often amazed how many people are blissfully unaware that you can actually change the size of content in the browser. Mind you with a laptop or any LCD you don't want to change the resolution because anything other than 'native' looks like ass - which is where large fonts/120 dpi setting can be handy, much less the new pervasive %zoom in Seven.