A client/friend of mine asked me to review the website she’s just had made.  She was unhappy (after having spent a good deal of money on it) and needed to get it updated for the better and wanted to opinions of another web professional to take back to the web design company. She is unhappy with it for several reasons, the main one being it doesn’t reflect HER at all. (Note, some review points refer to the rev 1 of the site.)

First Impressions

My first impression is that an engineer designed this site. Navigationally it is sound. All the categories are clearly marked (no mystery meat navigation). But the design and usability features are lacking. This is a one-person service-based company – I think the website should reflect her personality (since that is what she’s selling, after all). I know this woman personally, and this website does not reflect her personality or aesthetic at ALL. It is very cookie-cutter. There aren’t even any pictures of her! (UPDATE: photos were thankfully added) In the original design, they had used a deep (and angry, IMHO) orange, and had a silhouette of a woman on a beach in the background. Travel site anyone? The current site feels disjointed.

• “Spirited Impact” is floating up top in a red font not found anywhere else in the design (the red came from her existing logo/marketing materials).
• “Breakthrough by any means necessary” is also floating alone – and it’s not formatted in any way.
• For some reason the designer chose to have the pictures “break” the left side of the box, but it ends up just looking like the design itself broke.

Design size

The box design makes me feel claustrophobic. They’ve taken up more than a third of the box space for the header, which isn’t even very cohesive. And they’ve put all the site text inside a very shallow scrolling box. People don’t like to scroll anyway, and scrolling inside such a tiny box isn’t going to be very enticing. There isn’t that much site text to start with, so cramming it inside this box just doesn’t make sense. This site appears to be designed for 800 x 600 monitors, which is no longer the “accepted” common denominator. Should be designing on at least 1024 x 800.

Should Have Footer/Contact Info on Every Page

This site is lacking a footer at the bottom repeating the site’s navigation, and also providing a contact phone number and e-mail. (UPDATE: they added it!)

Testimonials Should Be Front and Center

Again, when you are running a service-based business, (or any business, for that matter), testimonials and word of mouth are your bread and butter. Where are her testimonials? Buried under the heading “Clients.” What’s worse, when you go to the Clients link (expecting to see a client list, which you don’t get), if you happen to keep scrolling, only then will you see the Testimonials. Testimonials belong front and center, according to Matt Bailey, of Site Logic Marketing. At the Search Engine Strategies NYC conference, he told us that you should have testimonials appear on every page. He suggested having a column for the testimonials built into the design, and having them rotate randomly. I suppose you could also put a different testimonial on every page. The point is, they should be obvious instead of hidden. (UPDATE: at least Testimonials have been raised to the level of subcategory).

Surface the Subcategories

This is a personal opinion, but I think that sub-nav should not be hidden on a nav category page. For example, on this site, If you click “services” you will see subcategories of “personal” and “professional.” I would prefer a drop-down menu with choices.

Better Naming Means Free Keywords

Most of the nav categories are fine, but I think “services” should be changed to “coaching,” as that’s the only service that Spirited Impact offers. By changing to “coaching” you’ve quickly added another keyword to the design structure – great SEO benefit!

Use Succinct SEO Keywords and Description

Although keywords and description meta tags are no longer powerful in getting the Google juice, it doesn’t hurt to have them in there. In ideal description would describe the who/what/where of the site in one or two sentences like this: Spirited Impact Nicole Stone and Spirited Impact offers life coaching using a toolbox of personal training, meditation, essential oils, and straight talk to open you to breakthroughs by any means necessary. Keywords would be things like: coaching, corporate, meditation, essential oils Instead, it looks like they lifted copy from her front page, and random words for the keywords.

<meta name="keywords" content="home, welcome, spirited, impact, everyone, tools, they, need,

happy, successful, life, just, gets, sometimes, help, break, through, your, self-imposed,

barriers, find, your, power, clients, people, notice, something, their, life, working, they, know">
<meta name="description" content="Home. Welcome To Spirited Impact  Everyone has the tools they

need to be happy and successful. Life just gets in the way sometimes. I help you break through

your self-imposed barriers and find your power. My clients are people who notice something in">

Make Page Titles Unique

Each page does have a title, but it’s too short. Again, Matt Bailey said that every page should be unique, and should have a short phrase in the page title. So instead of Products | Spirited Impact You could have: Mindful Products for spirit and body | Spirited Impact OR Personal Coaching For Breakthroughs | Spirited Impact

Conclusion

All in all I would say this isn’t a HORRIBLE site. The navigation is clean and it works. Pages load quickly. But the site design isn’t cohesive, and I don’t think it does as good a job promoting the client as it could. And I can say this because I know the client. But sadly because of this site design, site visitors won’t.