All right pretty new to posting on the forum but not new to reading it so be gentle.

Website is
http://www.designalcove.com

I am a freelance web designer so nowhere near pro but am ready to learn!

Please let me know what first impressions are (ie if the site annoys you or if it makes you feel good.. gotta make sure the right message is conveyed), what you would do to improve it, what else can be done to optimize it for search engines, and how it displays on other browsers. (I have tested it on Opera, Netscape 4, Netscape 7, IE 5.5 and up.. but I don't have Linux installed or some of the other os's that use Konquerer etc.)

Basically just any help at all that can be given to improve it and make it better would be great! So far I have enjoyed reading your tips and THANK you in advance to any who reply!

I like it .Very design driven. I like your logo at the top of the page..the "unfinished face"....looks very good.

Very nice design and organization. A little on the feminine side, though.

Where are your Alt attributes for all your graphics? I only see a few of them. You need them for all graphics.

You have done really fantastic if you are just beginning at this. Keep up the good work.

Nanci
www.neckwares.com

Thanks for the compliments.. I will work on getting the alt attributes for all of the graphics.

As far as it being on the feminine side.. that might be because I am female LOL!!

It looks very nice. I really liked the way that you had the links aranged in your portfolio. Made me rethink mine!

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Roxanne
King's Court Productions

Again, Thanks. My portfolio is my favorite part. I wish that I could take all the credit for it, but I can't. I merely designed a template to go around an already amazing piece of php software

Gallery...

http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.p...ews&file=index

Have to give credit where credit is due and love that it is open source:)

Hi sajdlz!
I was very impressed with your site. There is one glaring thing from my perspective as an online merchant and once-in-awhile directory editor. You have 0 contact info on your site which is a turn off to potential customers(contact form is nice but c'mon). It is very impersonal not to be diplaying an email or phone contact on your pages...that being even more of an issue in your "what we're about", "contact us" and "philosophy" sections. Very good design work, but who are you, where are you located? You may have personal reasons....but I'd never make out a contact form and send it to a company that doesn't even list it's name, phone, email addy! Most directories would not include you for that alone. If you are available, I would suggest a phone number and if not, still have one hooked to voice mail with forwarding to your "other" place of business or residence. And I would absolutely get a domain forwarding email address up on the pages somewhere if you can or are so inclined. I think you'll convert a lot more work. Designers may be in awe of the work but John Q. Public wants to write to someone, not submit a form, talk to you, not read your sections. They want to interract with their designer. Just another $.02 IMHO :)

cz.. thank you for your insight.. I never realized how much that could put people off on a site. I am working on setting up a phone line and will work on putting up better contact information tomorrow! Thanks for the help:-)

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Stacy-Lead Designer

Please review my site

I was also very impressed with the website...I agree with the previous post about the contact information. That is usually the first thing that I look for whenever I am about to do business with a company. I like seeing a phone number that I can call to actually talk to a 'real' person.

Also, it would be cool if the four words in the image on the right: Unique, Graphics, Design, and Marketing were direct links to that section of your site.

Besides that its great! (a lot better then I can do)

Good luck!

Sincerely,
Scott

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I never thought of linking those.. thanks for that idea Scott:-) I'll have to work on that later on!

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Stacy-Lead Designer

Please review my site

My first impression is - I love the graphics. Nothing specific, just the overall look is pretty, ornamental and creative.

Warning: I am a nit-picker. So please don't be dismayed at any comments. You have a lovely site. These are, of course, just my opinions.

The footprint graphics did not blend with the overall look. I don't know how to express this - they looked like cheap clipart and the rest of the graphics are very high quality.

Full sentences convey thoughts better than phrases when writing paragraphs of text. In the 1st paragraph of the 1st page, you state "The premier spot on the world wide web for design and marketing." I believe a full sentence would be preferable here. Otherwise, it reads like a misplaced headline.

Another nit-pick for language: "We put our heart and soul into" implies that you have only one heart and soul for the whole team... sounds funny.

Language goofs don't always stand out for readers, they just intuitively know something is amiss. So it's good to be as clear as possible. (yes, I am a writer ... could ya tell?)

NOTE: some research I have read indicates that email addresses on web sites are the most common place for spammers to gather addresses. Since you have forms, and you could post a phone number, you may consider removing your email address to reduce your spam. Or there are ways to obscure your addy from email harvesters using a bit of javascript or unicode. Email me and I'll show you the code I found and am using.

May I suggest you break up the text in the "What we do" section with some bullet points, some headings, anything to make it look less text heavy? What you say is nice, but while you describe that a visitor stays about 30 seconds on a site, you are using that time to present a thesis :-) Make it quick and easy to read ... remember to make short sentences, short paragraphs, short pages. This is not the place to tell your life story or to write a book. You want to FAST FAST FAST tell visitors what you have that they want, before they mouse-click you into oblivion.

Also, in the SEO forum here they talk a lot about using headings to make your site more crawler-friendly. You can use them to break up your text and perhaps increase your visibility at the same time.

Under "Our services" - "Clean navigation and usability comes" - use "come", not "comes".

On your quote page, where you ask if they have an existing website - you may want to request the url for your reference. You have 2 text boxes below, but you don't specifically ask for the url.

I don't see links to your other Alcove sites - Tech Alcove and Hosting Alcove. Wouldn't you want those linked somewhere?

Overall, I like this site. It was pretty easy to navigate, the colors and arrangement are pleasing.

Over time I would revisit the text and spark it up a bit - makes for kinda dull reading, IMHO. Personally, I don't care how companies got started. I want to know what you do, why you do it better than someone else, and why I should give you my money.

I hope this is of value to you.

Cheri
http://www.webincome.net

Wow.. I will look into all of those. Thanks for all of that.

As for the other Alcove sites.. works in progress. I have a centralized site (AlcoveGroup.com) that will link them all together.. but have yet to start the design on it. When it is done that will be there as well.

Thank you for your very thorough analysis of the site, it is much appreciated!!

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Stacy-Lead Designer

Please review my site

Not much I can really add that hasn't been said before...

Apart from it looks good but keep on developing ;)

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Street Racers UK - Car Modifying Online
Tickle Site UK - A FUN place to be!!

I like your site. It has all been said

Hi,

Very nice site. I like the logo and accompanying graphics. I enjoyed the way you presented your portfolio. The only thing that I really disliked was the nav buttons on the top right of the page. I thought they could look better - especially since the rest of your page looks so good. Nice work.

Dave,

www.deltadistributors.com/delta.html

Thanks for the sugestions on my site.

As for your site it seems everyone has said it already. The main things I would suggest are linking the right hand titles to go to that subject. I clicked on them expecting something to happen.

Also I would list your contact details as well. Leave the form as an aption but I hate it when people dont put thier contact details. I want to know if the person is in the same state as me or country. Also when I want work done, I like to speak to a person right then when I decide on a company I am interested in.

Something to think about, if your home page was not quite so tall then it would not need a slider bar. Myself and alot of people I know have the google toolbar on thier browser and it cuts off the bottom of pages if you are not allowing for that.

Just my opinion anyway.

Hi,

The first sentence in your Introduction should read,
"Welcome to the Design Alcove, the premier spot on the world wide web for design and marketing."

You do have the makings of a complete sentence, you just needed a little adjustment to it.

Nanci
www.neckwares.com

1) This was referred to before, but I actually clicked on your Marketing footprint and was surprised that I didn't get anywhere. Make those links.

2) I hated the arrows pointing to page 1, 2, etc. in your portfolio. I thought they were clickable to get to another page, not here's where you are now. The 'first page' and 'previous page' arrows worked as directional links. Why wouldn't those other arrows work too?

Then there's that one weird little dot. What's its purpose?

3) You are obviously talented, though. (I wanted to get a compliment in here :-)

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Nice site - Nice design - Nice structure.

Only commenst I would make are:

- check all your graphics are at the correct resolution for the displayed site - there is at least one which is 250K which could be displayed exactly the same if it was only 20K.
- Graphics protection - simply add your Logo/name as an overlay - this really puts of the graphics nabbers.

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Just do IT!

I took a look at your website and was fairly suprised to see some of the items in your portfolio. The graphics on the pages are nice, if you really did do them yourself. The reason I say that is some of the items in your portfolio are not acutally all yours.

I would reference the people that actually did the work to give the credit where it is due otherwise you should really remove it and not take the credit as your own.

Best Regards
JoeyT

Ps. I agree about the contact information not being there, but maybe there is a reason why it isnt.

A portfolio is like a resume, it shows things that you have worked on or work that you have done. Every website listed in my portfolio I have done some or all of the work on, even you can't argue with that. The graphics and other sections are entirely mine but I have no problem adding a reference to my portfolio for the party (parties) that worked on it with me.

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Stacy-Lead Designer

Please review my site

Ouch. Take a look at your site in Firefox (Mozilla). The border breaks up pretty badly. I do realize, though, that anything-other-than-IE users are rare on the Internet (about 6%), so you may not care if it breaks, but I thought you'd like to know.

Other than that, the site looks good. Maybe a little graphics heavy for a mainstream site that caters to many users still on a dial-up connection, but that's permissable on a graphic design site, in my opinion; people go to your site wanting to see examples of your work, so it's good that you've included just that, not only in your gallery, but also in the design of the site itself. Good work.

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Bourne in Alaska | Verticentric Design

Your site looks very nice and your graphics look fresh and original.

I like your portfolio layout - we've been playing around with that gallery script and it's nice to be able to see it live and online!

I agree with akbigdog, however, on the graphics content - when I'm at my home office, I'm on a very slow dialup (in rural northern Michigan, the normal connection is 21kb). It took quite awhile to load here. I test our sites on my dialup since most people visiting our sites are also on a slow dialup.

The only thing I have a problem with is your menu with the arrows...it doesn't go with your overall design at all.

For SEO, you might want to correct your TITLE tag before submitting; you're using too many characters to be robot-friendly plus you want it to read like a title.

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Marcie Wolf
AlphaGeek Web Design | MarcieWolf.com