Website Review

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Permalink Reply by Kelley Woods on July 31, 2010 at 5:49pm

Hi John,

Your Home Page is very clean and easy to read...I find that a good thing. But, it is also rather plain! What is the image of the snakes/shield depicting?

It may just be me, but I would not place IBS in a "psychosomatic" class along with psoriasis...

Are there more than one of you in practice? If not, using "us" doesn't make me feel confident about contacting you. If so, I look forward to reading about each qualified hypnotist.


Some typos: phobia's should be phobias and quaranteees sound scary!

Good start...remember to add a personal touch! Potential clients are looking for information AND a connection.

Best wishes,

Kelley

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Permalink Reply by Jon Rhodes on July 31, 2010 at 10:22pm

Hi John,

Its quite a nicely set out site that looks easy and simple to navigate, which is always a big plus. One thing though - perhaps you could make it more enticing for people to contact you. Maybe state something like 'Phone me or email me now for a free no obligation chat about how hypnosis can help you.' type of thing in a clear place, perhaps were the 'Achieve Effortlessly' box is at the right hand side.

Also I think you need to add a bit more of 'you' on the site John. Let people feel they know you after they have visited your site. You definitely need a picture, and probably a bio as well. Include your hobbies as well as your quals, maybe even your likes and dislikes type of hings. Many people are frightened of hypnotherapists as it's not every day you meet them. The more you can dispel this fear the more likely they are to phone you. Like Kelley rightly says, people are looking for information AND a connection!


Hope this helps John

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Permalink Reply by Bill Doult on July 31, 2010 at 11:53pm

Dear John,

First of all congratulations on your courage – or possibly foolhardiness – in inviting colleagues to provide critical reviews of your new website. Well I have tried to look at your site with eight different browsers for Apple Mac – Safari, Firefox, Camino, Google Chrome, Netscape, Opera, Seamonkey, and even a very ancient version of Explorer. So the problems I encountered may be a Mac thing.

Where do we start? Well the good news is that your home page loads almost instantaneously with all the browsers. But as far as good news is concerned, that’s about it.

The only page which can be reached easily is your index.html. None of your links worked for me. Not even the link to your site design: www.webforce.com works. If you paid money to those blokes to set up your site maybe you should demand it back. Or, if you have been working from a pre-prepared template which you bought from webforce, you may have changed a crucial part of the coding.

Did manage to land on the About Us page by typing in the address but clicking main menu at the top of the home page does nothing and on the home page, if you click on the issues hypnotherapy can help, you get this message:
“Not Found The requested URL /hypnotherapy_stop_smoking.htm was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”

Also on the main menu at the top of the home page. “Guarantee” has somehow acquired a third “e” – but also are you sure it is ethically correct. Certainly my own professional organisation specifically prohibits its members from claiming to offer guarantees.

Also have you thought through the typeface colour? Light grey is very attractive in large, easy to read copy – and I like your “Live the life your deserve” statement – but for the main type face, maybe you should either darken it slightly or enlarge the font size. Otherwise it is a wee bit difficult to read, which ain’t a good idea.

Have you considered creating a sitemap? They help the search engines map your website so it is more easily found.

Noticed from the View Page Source that your website has the facility to show the date. I don’t currently include that facility on my own website but have in the past and it can add something, am not sure why, to the overall appearance.

Also you don’t seem to have included any metatags. I know they’re not as important as they used to be but they are is still worth adding to the coding – with different tags for each page.

Hope you don’t feel I have been over critical and feel these comments, as is intended, will be of help.

Meanwhile, all the best – Bill Doult

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Permalink Reply by Antonio on August 1, 2010 at 3:58am

Personally I would recommend to use a CMS (content management system). I have become really fond of using wordpress for creating sites. Wordpress makes it extremely easy to manage pages/etc. If you want, I could take a few minutes to help you in creating a wordpress site (or even create a basic one for free, since no one took me up on my offer for a free website as my "pay it forward" contribution on the pay it forward group here on hypnothoughts. You can customize wordpress for maximum exposure. There are sooo many plugins for wordpress sites. I could go on and on about the benefits of wordpress, or we could just talk on skype or any other chat medium...

if you are on skype hit me up (my name is emergeunited)..

Antonio

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Permalink Reply by tony cott on August 1, 2010 at 3:22pm

John:
I could not get the links to work either! boy you got guts to ask us to do this haha. but you did so.....have you looked at other Hypno/whatever sites? did you notice how many ( ok a whole lot of them) are the same? Hypnosis does bla bla, I can do bla bla...you may want to peek at mine maverickhypnoitcs.com, perfect haha no way, but effective you bet! just remember this one rule: what makes you different? what makes you stand apart from anyone else?
just my 2 cents lol
and remember we are all works still in motion!
good luck
tony

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Permalink Reply by John O Connor on August 1, 2010 at 11:00pm

Thanks for the help guys!
I thought i sorted all bar 4 or 5 of the links last night about 12 hours ago.
I changed the banner a bit too.
Could you let me know what you think of it?

I havent added any of my bio/photos yet, since I was toying with keeping my anonymity...

Thanks
John

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Permalink Reply by Jan Krüger on August 2, 2010 at 4:03am

I originally decided not to post my thoughts, but then I thought I might be doing you a disservice by pretending that everything is lovely, so here they are. Perhaps they can be of use to you.

The design is simple and doesn't get in the way of people looking for information. Not all too many websites can claim that of themselves. On the other hand, it looks unpolished and piecemeal. The different shades of blue don't work well together. The header is like four things randomly stapled together (in general, most, though not all, components of the design look fine to me on their own, but not in context). The little spacing between the main text body and its border is not the amount of breathing room I'd have given it. Spacing within the text is a bit chaotic (and so is some of the spelling and typesetting). The two different typefaces don't combine too well.

If I had to pick one thing to change, it would be the header. Not only does something in my gut twinge a bit every time I look at that capitalised "Deserve", but I also don't think the in-your-face gradients and the outlines on the title text do anything to make the design better. And, well, the spacing is just completely weird.

Then again, I wouldn't want to pick one thing to change. I'd want to change a lot about it. Jon already mentioned that the site is rather impersonal. And that's actually okay, depending on what you want the design to convey. It can be designed to convey professionalism, a personal touch, modernness, straightforwardness, simplicity or a whole lot of other things. I don't see any such underlying concept in the current design.

I realise that my thoughts may sound harsh, but that's because I tend to be harsh with web design in general. Many, many websites are not designed well. Part of the reason is that everybody thinks they can design wonderful stuff, or at least more wonderful than they want to pay for something really good. Some of those everybodies end up selling their design incapabilities, so even if you pay someone you can end up getting something not very good.
My primary criterion for website design is always function, and your website is comparably good in that (there are some ergonomic concerns which I have hinted at above), but it doesn't do much for my secondary criterion, which is how well the design works as a whole and what it conveys.

The same things that apply in hypnosis also apply in design. For example: do things for a reason. A fancy language pattern is nothing without an underlying intention. A logo is nothing without a purpose... such as representing your mission or providing a fitting symbol for people to remember you by. And so on.

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Permalink Reply by John O Connor on August 2, 2010 at 11:56am

Thanks Jan - Thats exactly what i was looking for.
I'll get to work on it tomorrow!

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