Hello everyone,

I would be grateful if you can review the design of ExpertZoo.com. Our main page is of outmost importance to us. We tried to make our somewhat complecated site sound as easy as possible, but we are not sure if we have accomplished that. Please comment on design, if you understand right away what we are about or anything else you would change. All of your input will be highly valuable to us. Thank you.

Alex at expertzoo.com

The first thing I noticed was that your images are distorted. The people look short and fat. I then attempted a search. I went under legal and looked for an Attorney in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. The search results were for a Pet Trainer, a Money Manager, a Piano Teacher and a Sport Massage Therapist in San Diego. That made me leave. Provide some more appropriate results would be the first thing I would suggest.

First impression: looks very amateurish
The main image with the people holding the 'sign' is juvenile, not to mention distorted, as noted above.

I'm sure that plenty of comments on how the site functions (or doesn't) will follow, so I will proceed with a technical review.

Virtually all of your 'text content' such as 'how expertzoo works" is contained in images. You realize that search engines can't read text that is in images, don't you?
Text is usually only represented in images when the text style that you want is not available as an HTML font AND it enhances the user experience by supporting the design. Even in this case, the text graphics should be used sparingly (such a as for headers or fancy buttons only) and you should use IR (Image Replacement) techniques to ensure that text contained in those images remains accessible and visible to serch engines.

You did exactly the opposite: used HTML text for your headings and graphic images for your contextual text. Not only is it invisible to search, inaccessible, and 1990s retro, it looks like an eleventh grade Microsoft Word TextArt nightmare. Whomever was responsible for deciding to do it this way should be fired immediately and so should the person who made the images with the text in them.

Try viewing your home page without images and you'll see what the search engines see: almost nothing. Ditch the text images and try using real text. If you learn CSS you can make it look better than those cheezy images AND be visible by SE.

Back to your headings. Type them in the proper case ("Categories" and How Expert Zoo Works" for example instead of "CATEGORIES" and "HOW EXPERTZOO WORKS") and use CSS to style them in all caps if you want.

The first time I viewed your page, it completely locked up my browser (I had to force it tow quit) but before that I did run it against HTML validation and it failed with over 50 errors (I tested the home page).

Restarted the browser and got to see more pages; I will not comment on all the spelling errors I found because I wasn't even looking for them; let someone else doing an editorial review help you out there.

Table based layout, huh? how 90s retro of you. Many of your HTML validation errors were the result of using deprecated attributes on your table elements. Tables for layout cause accessibility issues, may cause problems for search engines (not like you have any content for them to index anyway until you get rid of all the images) and are a nightmare to maintain or make changes to when compared to using semantic markup.

Your CSS specifies font sizes in pixels which don't scale very well not to mention that your rules contain a lot of redundant rules. WAY TOO MANY CSS CLASSES...
get a book on CSS and start over.

Page layouts are a bit strange; found instances of wide gaps of empty space on your (what page am I looking at anyway? gee a title on the page would be nice) on several pages.

I didn't test your search, but someone else commented about getting less-than relevant results.
If you search fails, you don't even need to bother having a site at all so GET IT WORKING; and when you think it's working, test it, and test it again. Get your mother to test it, get your kid brother to test it, get an old lady to test it, anyone... take note of anything that is less than smooth (either technically or in terms of the user experience) and fix it.

ok I'm getting bored and tired. Here is the conclusion:

A site that claims to have knowledge of 'experts' should have a site that looks and functions like someone who actually knows what they're doing designed it (an expert, maybe?); as a matter of fact, it should be so transparent and easy to use that the user isn't even ever thinking about the design at all.

So, how do you get there?

1. scrap this retro-relic and start over
2. hire a photographer and a graphic designer to make decent images
3. make sure that your pages have plenty of text content, titles, alt attributes for your images, and get rid of all the images that are nothing but 'fancy' (NOT) text
4. get a book on CSS, read it and use it properly
5. get a book on usability, read it and redefine your architecture
6. make sure that your functionality works (especially the search as it is probably one of the most important parts of your site)

Just thought of something: why don't you use your site (if it works) to find a web development expert and hire them? (please don't tell me that one of your 'experts' designed this one; that would be sad, not to mention ironic)

Bottom line: Where were all the experts hiding when this thing was being built? for a site that promises to represent experts' I would at least expect the web site to have been designed by one. With this web site with it's funky images, cheezy text graphics, invisibility to search engines, funky search functionality, misuse of HTML tables and CSS, mis-spellings (I could go on) your credibility at finding experts is ZERO.

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amorphic8
http://www.amorphicmedia.com

Yes, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. The above reviewer is absolutely right, you cannot use images in lieu of text. Also, all photos must be sized properly, not distorted, as they are now. Choose a font and use it, right now you are all over the place with serif and sans serif choices.

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Austin video production - Full service corporate, non-profit and broadcast video production - Video production Austin

Thank you everyone for your feedback. Particularly, thank you amorphic8 for your extensive review. If you don't mind, we will fix it over the next few days and present it to you once again.