Hi All,

Never been real active on boards (but feel that i should certainly start) so please bear with me. I'm a designer that's been doing this stuff for a few years but i've never gotten feedback from other designers. i'd love a critic.

The site address is http://www.edge-technologies.com

I wanted to take a different approach than most with a technical companies site design. So i came up with what you see. Let me know what you think.

Thanks a bunch.

First, your site takes entirely too long to load - I am on DSL and if weren't reviewing this site, I would not stay until it loaded. however, once the site loaded, the navigation to your other pages went well.
Second... your site is very attractive...just the right touch for your target audience...
my only comment (except for the speed of loading) is that much of the information seems beyond my comprehension.. but perhaps your target audience will have more of an understanding of your services than I do. If not, I would make the informational text simpler.
other than that, it is a very professional looking site... and well done.

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Mary Ann
Affordable Websites Designed - www.m-goret.com

Thank you for your post. I will certainly look at the file sizes. It surprises me that you had a slow download but I'll look into it. Could you give me a guess as to the wait time?

Thank you for the very generous comments about the look of the site. I've been designing in a cave for a while and really don't get the type of feedback other designers can give.

The content is definately geered toward the target audience. Just the nature of the beast. Can you imagine being a designer in such tech heavy enviroment. Sometimes it's just very difficult. :)

Thank you again.

rand

I did not have any excessive waiting time, I think you site is very well presented, I have done a bit of web design in the past, and have done my website, and yours is very good.
Well done

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*Chris Child*
http://www.proxypla.net

Since I am not familiar with your business I was trying to look for more visual aids to help me picture how your services would help your target audience. Although you do provide links to arrange for a personal demonstration, I think you could engage your audience a lot more by displaying in thumbnail format screenshot, or reporting capabilities of your products and services. Perhaps a short video demo would be a great way to balance the heavy tech talk on all the other pages.
The site is very well laid out and easy to navigate, I am not sure I would place the intranet button with login requirements under the company section, a bit confusing.

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Joel Katona
Trendmetrix Software
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Your site is very well executed! I found it to load extremely fast, less than a second! Very clean, clear and concise!

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Custom ComputerHaven
"The Best for Less"
http://www.customcomputerhaven.com

It loaded reasonably fast for me, I liked the overall design, navigation was straightforward.

Yest, or the day before there was a thread going about what "professional" looking meant, I think this is close!

I personally would like to see your navigation links rollover to bold text, or some similar effect just to give a user a bit more help in understanding what they are. As is you must understand your mouse pointer changing, and or notice the status bar showing the url to navigate to. Otherwise I really like it. Another small suggestion, on the page showing customers logo's make the ones relating to success stories LINK to those stories. But people might not use them anyway, no big deal, just a thought.

Beautiful site. Well executed navigation, content is crisp and to the point. I would suggest adding text based links to the footer of you pages or at least a text link to a site map page with the text links on it. It will help those that have images turned off to find content easily and will also help with search placement.

I checked it on T-1 and it came up in less than 3 seconds. Pefectly fine. Great job.

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Scott Brinkerhoff - Art of Zen Studios
Web Design I Design Monk
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I couldn't find anything wrong with it either.

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Very professional work, well-designed, user friendly (even though I don't understand the terms used). On the other points mentioned here, Loading time was perfect less than 2 secs. I like the rollover idea. It would make a difference. I would suggest a small style sheet form. This way you don't get your source code too busy with a load of scripts.
Also, I do agree that some pictures would be helpful. Sometimes, the first 5 seconds are the most important to hook a visitor and there are numerous researches made out there on the net about it. The point is that a pic on a web page attracts your eyes and your sub-conscience gets the point even before you do; even if you don't look at the pic itself! Crazy stuff, no?
Anyways, well done and keep up the good work.
Farhad

Thanks you your kind words Chris. It means a great deal to me. Also it's good to know that everyone isn't having a significant download time.

I'll still look into the file size of the site but I usually keep that in mind when developing.

Thanks again for you feedback.

rand

We're actually looking into post some screen captures of the product in the enPortal section of the site. There's also and old video piece that was used for some trade shows that our marketing vp wants to add but it's kinda dated. I would like to build a flash demo of the product but it would just take so long.

Thanks your comments and kind words. It's greatly appreciated.

Rand

Thank you for your feedback. This is so cool! It's very kind of you all to take time to offer your opinions. It's very appreciated.

I'm glad it loaded quickly for you. Now I'm really curious as to why Mary Ann had trouble. Hmmm....

Thank you again.

rand

Thanks for the feedback Ed. Funny you should mention the rollover on the navigation. The site is built in coldfusion using cf custom tags. With that approach, I've yet to figure out how to get the rollovers to work. There's javascipt code in the header file but it just doesn't seem to work. Anyone have a solution?

Good idea about the logo link. If more of our customers would allow us to do success stories for them then i think that would work better but three out of the bunch might be tough to spot. I always find it interesting that we have clients that love our product but won't let us use them in any real marketing capacity. Weird.

Thanks for your feedback. I really do appreciate it.

rand

Thank you for your comments. You're very kind.

Excellent ideas with the site map and text nav at the bottom of the site. I'll pass that along to our marketing folks and see if I can't at least get up a site map.

By the way, I went to school at Virginia Intermont College which is located in Bristol, VA. That's pretty close to you neck of the woods. Have you heard of either the college or Bristol? Been there?

Thank you again. I very appreciated. You've all been very kind.

Rand

I can't think of a greater compliment. :)

I just found the quote button. Too cool. What a great community you guys have here. I hope to add too it.

Thanks for all your great feedback.

rand

Style sheet form? You know, I'll have to check that out. Maybe approaching it that way would work with the custom cf tags. Great idea!!

Again, Thank you all for you feedback. I've learned a great deal already.

Rand

Very nice looking site. Easy to navigate I like it.

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Custom Website Design | Search Engine Optimization | Web Design Templates

I like to create navigation schemes that are very quick to content. preferably one to two clicks but thats idealistic alot of the time.

Thank you for your feedback. I really am Thankful to you all. It so refreshing to get so many point of views and ideas that will allow the site to elevate to another level.

Thanks again!

Rand

Since you were wondering why it took me so long to get your site loaded, I was too... so I went back and it took 22 seconds to load... which isn't bad, I guess, but it's a far cry from the T1 load of 3 seconds... I don't know why it is taking longer to load for me... I am on DSL, so I'm running quite fast.

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Mary Ann
Affordable Websites Designed - www.m-goret.com

WOW. Thanks for taking the time to do the test and to letting me know your result. Thats just really nice of you.

I'll talk to some of the guys here at the office and see if I can come up with things that you might want to check on your end. It's probably the site but checking both sides would be a good idea. Do you have slow downloads with other sites? If the engineers come up with anything good that you might want to check I'll let you know. Once I have a file size, we'll be able to figure out just how long it should take to download over dsl. That'll give us a good clue.

I'll also make a size list of all my files and see just how heavy it is. It shouldn't be heavy but it's not like I haven't made a mistake before. ;)

I'm actually really concerned about that download time.

Thanks again for all your help.

rand

I LOVE your site.

It is so clean and relaxing on the eyes.

Your use of grey and red is perfect to help the visitor focus on the content.

Some type of rollovers on the links would be an improvement I would make if I was planning to revamp. Maybe a slighly darker grey bar over the link text. But it's FINE.

I might also make the red titles a bit larger on the content pages. To match the size of the 'Did you know?' over to the left.

Thats nitpicking w/ my own personal preferences though. In short - its inspiring. I hope we see more of your work :)

Lori

P.S. Oh - no issue with load times for me.

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"inspiring"....wow. Thank you dewachen. That's a big statement. I'm honored you think I earned it.

When designing the site, I wanted a relaxed and almost musical/rythmic feel to it. Projecting how the enPortal product will simplify the users life.

I wish I could do the rollovers but haven't gotten around the technical difficulty. We just got ColdFusion MX so maybe it has addressed this issue in the custom tags. We shall see.

Thank you for your compliments and suggestions. You guys really have no idea just how much your comments mean. I'm truly glad you like the site. Hopefully I'll be building a site for myself soon (deadlines are looming right now so no time) and will post it when I can.

I will definately be hanging around here and offering comments and suggestions when I can. Thank you all for your help and great suggestions.

Rand

It is fresh. I like it. The red and gray works perfectly fine and makes the sight easy on the eye. Welldone.

The only thing I as a designer can point out is the rounding off at the footer section. If you could at least keep the feel you have created at the top to run at the bottom just to end it off. Coz there is no telling where the content ends and the footer begins, if you get what I mean? Once you scroll down, you tend to lose the feel of the design and that white space is a little too much.

Just my 2sense. Otherwise great stuff.

loads well - I'm on DSL in UK - first page was up in under 3 secs...
clean, crisp, design
everything with a reason - i like that

well done!

aidan

Info202,
Try Pinging the URL. Rand if you can, give info202 your IP address. THis way she can see where she is routing through. It could be a bottle neck issue to her provider that is causing the problem.

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Scott Brinkerhoff - Art of Zen Studios
Web Design I Design Monk
© 2000-forever - All rights reserved by me - SO THERE!!

I get what your saying. I will certainly keep that in mind with next site I develop. Maybe just repeating the gray bar with the white vertical lines (thinner of course) to place the footer on top of.

Great idea!!

Thank you for take time to send me your advice and kind words. I'm really grateful!

rand

Thanks Aidan/tigersigh

Glad that the majority of people aren't having the delayed download issue. I personally hate slow loading sites so it is something i always keep in mind when developing. The engineers here are telling me that there's a ton of things that could be causing the problem for info202.

Glad you liked the site. I like effecient use of content and graphics. direct and to the point.

Thanks for you feedback!

Rand

info202

Our head engineer told me to have you ping the site as well. (ghstdrgns knows his stuff) He said that you could ping "www.edge-technologies.com" with out the exteranl ip address, so give that a shot.

Another engineer suggested doing a tracert (trace route) to the site. This will show how many servers you're hitting to get to the site. The more servers the slower the load.

They also said its a complex problem with lots of varibles. If your having this same issue with other sites (of similar weight - which i haven't had a chance to nail down on my site yet - sorry) you might want to contact your provider and question them.

Thanks again to all for the great comments and suggestions!

rand

you need to have something happening in the navigation to show what's a link or not. especially on the interior pages, this isn't clear as it's all the same colour text as the body text. contact us in the top nav would help + you should think about more links in general otherwise it's too 'brochure' like and not taking enough advantage of the web's strengths. think about users' paths through the site and providing them with options. don't assume that they'll get the top navigation - I have done tests with people who have ignored it completely and other weird (to me) stuff ...

Thanks for you great comment!!

You know, thinking of it, I probably could create a rollover in the sub nav of the site. that code doesn't rest in the header so I'm pretty sure I could add movement there.

As for the contact us...it was in the upper nav but the vp of marketing requested it be moved. Oh well....

Thanks for the comments!!

rand

I have heard of the city, I understand it is small but very pleasant. I have only lived in TN for 4 years, and I would say 80% of that has been spent behind a monitor. I grew up on the West Coast and am hoping to go back. You wouldn't know anyone on the West Coast looking for an exceptional designer would you? :o)

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Scott Brinkerhoff - Art of Zen Studios
Web Design I Design Monk
© 2000-forever - All rights reserved by me - SO THERE!!

lol

Yep, Bristol is pretty small. Shockingly enough, I actaully grew up about an hour north of Bristol back into the mountains of Virginia. If you ever want to see real hillbillies, I suggest you go and check it out. It was a nice place to grow.

By the way, if i knew anyone on the west coast, i'd hook you up and they'd be very lucky to have you. Your designs are fantastic. Good luck on getting back west.

rand