Completely redesigned website - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly...

[PDXMicro]

Hey all

I recently completely redesigned my website and decided to go Wordpress. I hired two different web designers previously and had about 3 different designs. This time I decided to just spend the time and do it myself. I've never used wordpress, nor really heard about it much from a business website point of view. Originally, I was really under the impression it was only for blogging. Boy was I wrong!

http://www.pdxmicro.com

Please let me know the good, bad, and ugly! I am very open to constructive criticism and would greatly appreciate it

 

[techroc]

Looks pretty good.

I did a pagespeed test on your website and it ranked 68/100 which isn't that great.

http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com

check it out, this will help your SEO and also keep users on your website!

 

[holtmichael09]

Hey all

I recently completely redesigned my website and decided to go Wordpress. I hired two different web designers previously and had about 3 different designs. This time I decided to just spend the time and do it myself. I've never used wordpress, nor really heard about it much from a business website point of view. Originally, I was really under the impression it was only for blogging. Boy was I wrong!

http://www.pdxmicro.com

Please let me know the good, bad, and ugly! I am very open to constructive criticism and would greatly appreciate it

Looks really good! Content is easy to find and readable, and it's very well organized

 

[lward1]

Looks really good! Content is easy to find, Like the colors. What template did you use? If you don't mind me asking.

 

[PDXMicro]

Looks pretty good.

I did a pagespeed test on your website and it ranked 68/100 which isn't that great.

http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com

check it out, this will help your SEO and also keep users on your website!

Thanks for that! I just posted up the new site about 3-4 days ago so google and the other search engines have some work in crawling the site still. Originally, I had a landing page that just said that a new website is being developed - so there was no content for me to be ranked. I'll definitely keep an eye on that link you listed though - and thanks a ton for the feedback!

Looks really good! Content is easy to find, Like the colors. What template did you use? If you don't mind me asking.

Thanks - I ended up using Karma as my wordpress template. I purchased about 3-4 different templates and Karma was the best I found for my needs

 

[PDXMicro]

16k_zx81, thanks for the massively long and detailed review you left for me on feedback roulette! I'll take all of the advice you can give

 

[1on1 Computer Services]

I was going to ask you about your legal stuff. Did you get a lawyer to write all that up? It was very comprehensive.

Thanks

 

[PDXMicro]

Actually I did it myself - but with the help of others I've found throughout the internet.

Feel free to use them to make your own (rewording, taking bits and pieces, etc.) Please don't straight copy/paste.

Edit: corrected the sentence above due to a couple of requests.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I noticed fuel was misspelled in your fine print for the $2 surcharge per additional mile. it's on the schedule an appointment "image". Not sure what you call that? Banner maybe?

 

[Jmpc]

Your site looks amazing. Wordpress is the way to go. I use it on my site and find it easy to maintain, update, and change the look/feel.

As stated above, page load is a wee bit slow. Work on that and you've got a pretty stellar site.

 

[draelee]

looks really good. clear and easy to navigate through. good job

 

[ProTech Support]

I love the design of the website and think you did a great job. The site is very clean, easy to navigate through, and is laid out in an order that makes sense. The only thing that bothered me was the loading times. The first link I clicked was the "Submit Payment" and it took over 30 seconds for the page itself to load. Now I know Wordpress can be clunky so I would definitely recommend checking out some of the optimization guides out there. Also it would not be a bad idea to duplicate the website on another hosting server and see if that helps at all. I know alot of the times people get really wrapped up int he optimization that they never consider the server itself may be playing a role in the latency as well.

 

[PDXMicro]

I noticed fuel was misspelled in your fine print for the $2 surcharge per additional mile. it's on the schedule an appointment "image". Not sure what you call that? Banner maybe?

Good eye! I completely missed that one. Thanks

Your site looks amazing. Wordpress is the way to go. I use it on my site and find it easy to maintain, update, and change the look/feel.

As stated above, page load is a wee bit slow. Work on that and you've got a pretty stellar site.

Yea, I definitely need to reduce the image sizes it seems. Thanks for the reminder

 

[PDXMicro]

looks really good. clear and easy to navigate through. good job

Thanks!

I love the design of the website and think you did a great job. The site is very clean, easy to navigate through, and is laid out in an order that makes sense. The only thing that bothered me was the loading times. The first link I clicked was the "Submit Payment" and it took over 30 seconds for the page itself to load. Now I know Wordpress can be clunky so I would definitely recommend checking out some of the optimization guides out there. Also it would not be a bad idea to duplicate the website on another hosting server and see if that helps at all. I know alot of the times people get really wrapped up int he optimization that they never consider the server itself may be playing a role in the latency as well.

30 seconds?! That page doesn't have much content at all - and the images are very small (3kb, 5kb, etc.) I'm not sure if there is anything I could possible do to that page to make it load faster? I did a page test from New York, NY (furthest from me in the US), and it loaded in 3 seconds?

 

[PDXMicro]

due to the page size issues and loading problems, I've done nothing but work on optimizing my site for the past 72 hours. It looks like all the work has paid off!


Google Page Speed Score: 95/100

YSlow Overall Performance Score: 96/100

Web Page Performance Test Score: 93/100


Now that's something to be proud about Thanks to everyone for the input, and especially getting me to look into my site speed.

 

[ProTech Support]

I am glad you got it sorted, the site is loading very quickly now. It could be it was peak times if you are using a shared hosting server which may have resulted in the slow down.

 

[PDXMicro]

I am glad you got it sorted, the site is loading very quickly now. It could be it was peak times if you are using a shared hosting server which may have resulted in the slow down.

Yea, after researching a bunch about site speeds, I found out tons of information that I had no idea about. Header expiration times, image squashing, combining CSS and JS files, page caching, and lots more... This was a very good experience for me for any future web design projects I get myself into.

 

[sassenach]

Congrats on both the site and the speed increase. When I first looked a few days ago, your home page loaded in 33 seconds on my machine (Win 7 64 bit + Opera 11.51). Today it fully loaded in 3 seconds and my cache had been cleared before testing.

 

[PDXMicro]

Congrats on both the site and the speed increase. When I first looked a few days ago, your home page loaded in 33 seconds on my machine (Win 7 64 bit + Opera 11.51). Today it fully loaded in 3 seconds and my cache had been cleared before testing.

Great to hear! It looks like the hard work paid off after all Thanks!

 

[TopLevelComp]

I really like the design, but I'd throw more information on the front page. You have a lot of rotating images, but it's sparse on text, which could be bad for customers who are still on dial up, or having to use a smartphone to browse.

You're services menu is pretty long, and could be overwhelming for some customers. I like you level 1, level 2 and level 3 structure on the rates page, see if you can incorporate that into the services menu.

I'm not sure about the Partners menu, it just seems odd.

Move your Blog to the right, make your contacting information more important than the blog, as you're probably only using the blog for SEO.

Contact Us page, make your phone number in text as well, for customers with dial up or using smart phones. Make it a major part of the page, so it's easily found.

I'd also move the service area map to the front page.

If you can, move the customer reviews to the side, or up higher. Use the reviews to your advantage for selling yourself, don't make it the last on the page.