New Web Design Business

conceptdata

New Member
Hello everyone,

I am looking for some initial thoughts on our new venture www.conceptdata.co.uk

We are looking to add this arm to our parent company where we primarily deal with IT Services, Software Development, Backup and Storage etc.

Our Software dev dept create online portals for CRM, timesheets etc and thought we could extend this into pure web design.

This site is based on the bootstrap framework.

Any initial thoughts?
 
Honestly.... it looks like you've taken a template and changed some colours... we've got a fairly strong view on this forum that a web design site should show the best of the what the owner can do and this doesn't, sorry
 
Thanks for the reply Levi.

No template just the bootstrap framework. Seriously though is there nothing here you like...further past the home page.
 
If people don't like the first page then they're not going to look at the other pages, I think someone on here said people make their minds up in about 4 seconds if they're going to stay on a site or not.

The rest follows the same 'theme' as the homepage and I stick with the view that it needs to show something more. But before you go changing things, wait for some other reviews and see what they say too, I may be in the minority...
 
My initial thoughts upon viewing your website are simply that it looks like just another web design/development company site. I agree with Levi in that websites for other industries don't need to adhere to such high standards. For example, if you were an architect then your website wouldn't absolutely need to be designed and built to impeccable standards, however, I guarantee that their construction work does. And it's the same here, you need to apply much higher standards because this is the primary focus of the company and I don't believe it's enough to have an okay website in this situation. He was also right to mention the 4 seconds before people look away - I'm sure you're probably aware of some such statistic, and they do vary in time (3, 3.5, 4, 4.687 seconds etc) but generally speaking people don't spend very long determining whether or not they like, and want to stay on, your site. Imagine they've searched Nottingham Web Design and have tabbed open the top 10 results, the generic ones are going to be closed first!

Just going over the design briefly, I'm not very keen on the design of your navigation. The way you've separated each link doesn't look particularly attractive and the shadow applied to the active button feels like it shouldn't be there because it's too subtle.

There are a couple of design inconsistencies in regards to the buttons on your site. If we take the home page, the Tell Me About It button is styled differently to the three beneath, why? Also I think the use of gradients on the buttons looks out of place in a gradient free web design. If I hover over the Brand Me button, it instantly makes the page look more appealing and gives that button a much more beneficial contrast to the rest of the site that will help draw it to the users attention. You should make the current hover state the default state and apply a lighter highlighted version instead, oh and you should also do the same for the Tell me about it button too.

The other aspect of this site which I have to point out is that absolutely nothing makes me think "Wow, I need to find out more about this company". There are no project examples, no previous clients list, nothing apart from some buttons, a map and your logo dotted around all over the place! I realise that it's a new business venture but surely you can put something together? Otherwise there is really no reason for potential clients to stay on your site or shortlist your company for further investigation/quotes.

And last but not least, I think your footer section is too dominating. That purple colour works well enough, but the visual hierarchy seems to have been a little messed up here, my eyes don't know whether to focus on the top half or the bottom half.

I also felt little to no compulsion to view the rest of the site, however I'll go through it for the purposes of this critique. Even when browsing through designers/developers sites that look incredible and have x, y and z awards, all too often I end up feeling quite disappointed by the time I've looked through their portfolio/previous projects section. I know the clients often have a helping hand in this, however, the current projects you have put up don't look particularly modern or exciting and this will reflect heavily on the conclusions that potential clients will draw from your site and any other communications they have been made aware of/had.

Another issue that you have is that you're attempting to communication potentially alien and/or complicated services/information to people, especially when it comes to hosting, for example. The other pages feel heavily dominated by text content and again, a confusing visual hierarchy seems to be in play here with lots of textual content that hasn't been clearly defined. If the users have to read a paragraph of text to work out what that text is about in the first place then that's just one more thing that's going to contribute to a person thinking "Ugh, what a boring page.. I can't be bothered to read all of this." I would also be wary of using jargon because I don't believe that it's going to help you too much. Let's take a look at the following sentence:

"Customer websites are hosted on high performance VMware ESXi host servers with both resource and fail over protection, our data center is also equipped with a UPS power." - Your site, hosting page.

To most people, even if they are looking for a new website, this sentence might as well not even be here because I'm quite confident that most people have absolutely no idea what a VMware ESXi host server is or how fail over protection is going to help them.

Overall the site isn't that bad, however, as a web design/development company your website will be held to much, much higher standards than other sites!
 
No problem, best of luck with your site, let us know how you get on!
 
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