After spending the better part of a year transferring over 900 pages of content I've finally launched the latest version of our site.

Practical leadership articles, books, consulting and training

Don't be kind. I need some real actionable feedback to make it even better.

Cheers,
Aidan

I would change the homepage title tag to: Practical leadership articles, books, consulting, training - Clemmer

The client list scroller moves way too fast (I can't read the names) and is very annoying.

I don't care for the colour scheme. It is just not attractive to me. Too washed out.

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Dave Barnes
+1.303.744.9024
http://www.marketingtactics.com
sitting in my basement with my iMac

The Look

The flash runs way to fast. it is almost insane how fast the words move across it.

The top section with flash and the navigation looks great. So great job on it.

Everything below the flash is too boxed in looking.
The box look with the "Click here to learn more! " I usually see this type of setup on affiliate sites.


Other Things

Navigation:
The "Home" link needs to be changed to http://www.jimclemmer.com only.
It is currently
http://jimclemmer.com/component/opti...age/Itemid,34/



SEO

I'm not going to go into the SEO part of the page. It is anywhere near set up to do well on search engines. the only hope for the site the way it currently is would be to get links directed to the site from other high ranking sites.
You would be best to hire someone to help with SEO of the site if you plan to go that direction at anytime.


Finally:

My main impression is that someone had a great idea and then started to make it a reality and then threw the rest of it together. Sorry to be so blunt. Please take that the right way.


Google Junky

Thanks for the tips.

Unfortunately the colours were chosen based on the corporate branding scheme, so there's not much I can do with them. The other treatments I looked at were even more off-putting.

I've got my designer slowing the banner scroll to a crawl and I've replaced the "Click here for more" line with descriptive keyword-rich links.

I've also got an SEO company analyzing the site for Google.

Oddly enough if you type "articles" into Google the site comes up on the second page - which is more interesting than useful as the term is so generic as to mean absolutely nothing when it comes to qualifying leads.

Anything else?

Thanks again,
Aidan

The site is too busy for my tastes, too much going on. If it were my site I'd think about ways to simplify the look.

There are a couple minor errors in the markup:

[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.jimclemmer.com/ - W3C Markup Validator

and the css (if missing a page of css is minor!):

W3C CSS Validator results for http://www.jimclemmer.com/ (CSS level 2.1)

Well, I don't have design specific feedback. But, I run a website, MBA Depot, that links to several of Jim's articles. Unfortunately, you seem to have killed all the old links with the new redesign so users of my site and any other site linking to his articles are going to be frustrated and undoubtedly it will hurt your SEO. Usually it is fairly easy to write a script to automatically redirect articles from their previous addresses to the new. I recommend you do this.

Regards,
Jeff

P.S. I even wrote an article, Website Redesign: Marketing Suicide?, about this all-too-common issue.

Greetings,
I would generally click right on through a site like this. It appears way too busy. Would it be possible to slim down the data and not try to provide everything to everyone. The thrust of the site seems to be vague in that it is difficult to find "What can I do for you" on the site. What exactly is the product you are selling? And to whom? It really could use a word diet. This is in addition to the previous comments on the speed of the client list scrolling, way too fast. Also the Flash movie at the top of the home page changes faster than I can read it comfortably. The whole home page seems to try to present too much information on one page. Overwhelming. "Click on through".
Good luck. Well....you said, "Don't be kind".

I said "don't be kind" and I meant it

First I should say the 301 redirects to all of Jim's articles should be up on Thursday. Hopefully that takes care of any broken link issues. This is the third iteration of the site in the last 4 years. Each time crucial mistakes were made that resulted in a drop of traffic. I'm hoping to avoid this and hopefully generate a few more book sales and newsletter subscriptions.

The all things to everyone is a good observation.

Jim's niche is HR, managers and executives - and his products are keynotes, workshops, retreats along with books. He does have over 200 articles on the site which tend to bring in the majority of the traffic (due to the good graces of folks like Jeff).

I've set up separate sites for all his products that all eventually lead back to the "mamma site."

The header is being retooled as we speak based on some previous comments.


This is great. Keep 'em comin.

Cheers,
Aidan

Agreed on the 'too busy' thing.

I'm thinking that even if you beefed up the padding and margins in your main paragraphs, it may add enough whitespace to make it work.

Ditch the blue link colour...it's brutal. For the dropdown menus, make the background the maroon colour instead of red for consistency.

The flash text is way too fast. Throttle that bad boy down.

Code-wise, you've got some validation errors to work on, and I'm not even gonna touch the nested tables. Tisk tisk.

Hope this is somewhat helpful.

Get some styles in there.. this is not 1996. You don't need the blue links. Yuck

That flash text is like speed reading on crack

It's like being overwhelmed by in-your-face crappy design and old school programming. I've seen better websites from 10 year olds 15 years ago. I think my eyeballs are starting to bleed.

The guy asked for a site review not a personal attack.

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Custom Website Design | Search Engine Optimization | Web Design Templates

Actually, he said.. and I quote

Don't be kind.

However I do think that he was thinking that common sense would come into play and it would have been a constructive post.

The site is not bad looking at all and the use of the blue links increases the chances of someone clicking on them.

I would get rid of the scrolling text, as well as the flash in the header.

And I would try out a couple other colors for the background color. The red in the drop down menu is a bit much and does not match any color being used on your site.

I'd move the video over to the right hand side and put some good text in the center of the page.

After I removed the flash from the header I would put some information and pictures that told what it is I do as well as my contact information.

You have 3 seconds to grab your visitor and start turning him into a client.

I'd set the site up for that and nothing more. As it is now there is too much going on.

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Custom Website Design | Search Engine Optimization | Web Design Templates

White space is a good thing. Everything is so tight and cramped. Try adding more line spacing. Padding around the paragraphs and headings. Even the menus need more spacing.

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Jane Noel
http://www.InWestmoreland.com
Westmoreland County PA's Business Directory

I appreciate all of this and I'm looking at implementing a lot of your suggestions.

I don't sweat the insults. There's a percentage of that on any board.

Thanks everyone.

Aidan

Hey Jim,

I just looked through your site and took the "Real Me" test. The response was. "Get to know and love yourself. Live the life you (not others) want to live. " hehe.

To Start... your site has a lot of content, which I think is good. You can really retain visitors on the site. Heck, I sat on there for 10 mins just looking around. Although, the front page put me off at first, too much text. If you can't read it in 7 seconds, most people won't read it.

As other have stated, try out some CSS to style the text/links.

Overall, the site is very complete content wise.

The design needs attention. It just falls apart to the eye, but could be improved! For example, there are too many variations of red. There is the red/purple-ish menu, then red in the flash and a different red in the drop down menu. They are all different and should be the same color family. When you determine which reds to use... then use that sucker in your CSS text, etc.

I wouldnt blow it up, just slowly update what is there.

I see you included me in your book... http://jimclemmer.com/content/view/961
haha, ok that was lame.

out

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