Agree with AtomicChip about the date (and feel the same about the rolling news headlines).
The blue border is rather dark, and doesn't contrast well with the lettering on the selected button (e.g. the "Home" on the home page). The little red logo doesn't show up at all. If you keep the blue, consider making the logo and lettering on selected buttons yellow. I think it would look better if the selected button did not look so radically different from the unselected ones. Maybe, from your comments, you do too.
The other problem with the blue is that is contrasts a lot with the white background of the page proper. The result looks rather old-fashioned and amateur. The extra light blue bars and the use of a serif font add to this fussy old-fashioned feel. I'd expect a telecomms company to want to look
modern.
The order of the buttons down the left is odd - "Home" should definitely be the first one in the list, "Contact" should (perhaps) be the last. "Company Info" should really be labelled "About" (see
this article). You should also try to avoid referring to "sites" in the side bar, it's confusing - when I see a button labelled "Site Search", I expect to be able to search your
web site from it.
I find the text on your site rather tortuous and difficult to read:
Through strategic planning and a dedicated desire to fully understand their clients overall objectives, Subcarrier communications has been continually successful in meeting our clients requirements on a recurring basis.
I found my attention wandering by the end of the first line. Try to keep your language simple and direct, not because you visitors are stupid but because they are
busy. Don't waste their time translating marketing-speak into english - they're just going to go elsewhere.
Even after reading the rest of it, and some of the rest of the site, I don't feel I really understand what your company does. Now that's partly because I know nothing about your line of business anyway, of course. You seem to do a lot of things, but your site isn't targetted at anyone in particular. Someone coming to the site thinking, say, of having a mast erected on their premises may not see immediately that you can do that for them, nor will they easily find bits of the site that apply to them.
It can be a useful technique to think up some typical customers and/or visitors to your site. Give them names, flesh them out as real people - like characters in a novel or a play. Then think about how they will react to your site - what they'll be looking for, what they'll find useful. You can see an example of this approach (albeit with a different end-purpose) at
.
My suggestion would be to have your home page start with something like "Subcarrier Communications is New Jersey's premier provider of telecommunications services. We specialise in..." Then have a series of subheadings, one for each of the main services you provide, each with a short explanatory text and a link to more information deeper in the site. Your navigation buttons would go to the same subsections.
A final point: is that list of comms sites really useful? It seems to take up a lot of your site - 5 of your 12 nav buttons point to aspects of it - but it doesn't seem part of your core business. Are all those sites managed by you? Seemingly not if I can submit my own to the list. I'm not suggesting you get rid of it - it's the sort of thing that could generate a lot of incoming links from radio geeks
- but make it a single subsection of the site. Have one nav button going to an introductory page, from which visitors can search the directory, download a roster, submit a site etc. It'll give the geeks a good page to link to as well...
Sorry to trash your site so much, feel free to ignore whatever you like, but I hope it's given you some food for thought.
-- Chris Hunt
