Thread: Website Re-design Critique

Hey all, re-designing a website for a client, what are your opinions?

Original: Stacks Property Search & Acquisition agents London & UK - Homepage

Re-design: Stacks Property Search and Acquisition | Buying Agents Since 1984 | Homepage

Really hard to give an opinion unless you clarify your client's aim out of the re-design so you get relevant and constructive opinions.

If the client is re-designing in order to widen the GUI and display a larger logo... then you are on the right track!

~Peace~

One of my clients got me to redesign his site: Stacks Property Search & Acquisition agents London & UK - Homepage and he had a designer come up with a design and I made the site so it looked like that and the client asked me to change this and that and we ended up with Stacks Property Search and Acquisition | Buying Agents Since 1984 | Homepage. Now he's saying that he prefers the original design he got a different designer to draw up. What do you think?

on the site version I would lose the default embossed effect on the 3 light brown panels

and instead of fading those pictures to white and back, just fade them into each other, also keep the individual photos on screen more than the 3 seconds they display for, would at least double if not triple the delay.

Also, look to put their company number and registered office details.

Pretty much finished the main site now. What does everyone think?

Stacks Property Search and Acquisition | Buying Agents Since 1984 | Homepage

It loaded very slow for me, some of those really small images are 1/2 a MB, why?

I still stand by my original thoughts!

In addition I would also lose all the file extensions especially off the spam links at the bottom, no need to have index.html on every link.
you also need to implement a 404 and other error pages.

all of those footer links are better off in a list and u dont need to put the same class on ever single one, you could do that off the footer a or footer ul li a
try saving that as xml and parsing it, you will find it won't parse.

why on earth are you using an iframe to insert the blog?

contact form barfs out of the site if form errors.

the top nav bar changes styles from white bar to blue(with border) depending on page.

I would say your about 70% there atm - there are also numerous validation errors depending on pages.

Hope some of that helps

I don't like the footer links either, but the client is insisting they stay and the same with the blog. Which pages have the differnet nav? Will have to change them.

I can't remember which pages, I just clicked on some of those bottom links to see if they were much different, your going to have to check the whole lot.

It looks to me as though these are all separate files? rather than using a template system, therefore you will have multiple files to fix rather than code once and reuse approach. That's ok for smaller sites, given the number of pages you have there though a template approach would have been the way to go.

you wanna get that blog out of the iframe going forward otherwise serps/seo won't be as effective.

You've already mentioned the bottom links, so I won't preach about those. They're incredibly poor practise though.

Similar thoughts to what else has been said, fade the images between each other, rather than to and from white. The emboss on the blocks on the right doesn't look right. Contact page - personally I'd make sure the text inputs and the text areas are the same width, also some of the check boxes don't have a gap between themselves and their label. Blog - database fail :P To be honest, the handwritten testimonials is.....lets just say I don't like them, lol. Craaaazy amount of text on the press page, although I guess that's out of your control?

A few things I noticed when I flicked through :)