Website comments (and help!)

[MikeTrike]

Ok so we have been through about three revisions, with quite a few improvements over the months. However I have had a couple of comments about it having too much on the face of the site. I am sure you all have seen thousands of sites, and have an idea of what looks good and what does not. I guess I am just looking for a broader opinion, also the target audience of this site is photographers.

http://www.aperturehost.com/

-Mike


I also have a couple other sites that I will throw up in other posts that can use a broader audience of "critique."

 

[MikeTrike]

We finally got the new site completed (or so I think we have) There was some simplifying, lots of cleanup, new graphics and layout.

http://www.aperturehost.com/

If anybody checks it out, post up appropriate comments so we may take action against anything that may be out of whack.

Thanks!
Mike


EDIT: For comparison purposes: http://aperturehost.com/old/

 

[tgabe213]

Looks good. I think you need to carry over the logo from the old to the new one.
My only quick obersavation while looking on phone
Posted via [H] Mobile Device

 

[maw]

While I like the new look a lot, I think the layout of the info on the old site is better. For me, it's easier to tell what services you offer on the old site than on the new one.

Those shifting nav menu links are a bit annoying, something about their behavior makes me take an instant dislike to them. Maybe they shouldn't "shift" so much, or just not shift at all.

 

[MikeTrike]

While I like the new look a lot, I think the layout of the info on the old site is better. For me, it's easier to tell what services you offer on the old site than on the new one.

Those shifting nav menu links are a bit annoying, something about their behavior makes me take an instant dislike to them. Maybe they shouldn't "shift" so much, or just not shift at all.

Thanks for the input, the annoying glow slide thing has been pulled. Also I am currently working on block modules, similar to the footer ones on the new site. To mimic the old site a bit more, to make it friendly and familiar.

 

[MikeTrike]

Looks good. I think you need to carry over the logo from the old to the new one.
My only quick obersavation while looking on phone
Posted via [H] Mobile Device

I need to have somebody better with graphics take a look at that one. My only problem was the red on red throwing a wrench in the works. I will dive into that one as well, again thanks for the input. Things just flow better when you have a 3rd party take a look at things for you.

 

[mikeblas]

The Ferrari design rip-off is a little too blatant for me. The prose is pretty sad. Stuff like "No other web host out there meets our standards for support," is not compelling. "This one is easy, if it's free, web based, and it helps your business." doesn't make sense.

99.5% up time is more than an hour per month of downtime.

The site is very slow; five to eight seconds to load pages, which isn't impressive. You might try running YSlow or firebug to figure out where your problems are. At least part of the problem is that your code is very sloppy. You include the giant mootools header twice in a row, right on subsequent lines, for example. Lots of of whitespace, and no compression at all.

 

[CEpeep]

So where do you buy your unlimited sized hard drives on which to host your users with unlimited disk space? I checked online and the largest I saw was the new drives with 2TB of space which is still significantly less than unlimited space.

 

[MikeTrike]

So where do you buy your unlimited sized hard drives on which to host your users with unlimited disk space? I checked online and the largest I saw was the new drives with 2TB of space which is still significantly less than unlimited space.

Unlmited as in you will run out of your allotted CPU & Ram resources before you ever fill up any real drive space. But average consumers for some reason are fascinated with "Unlimited." For example, this forum is probably several gigs worth of database, no big deal in terms of storage, but It beats the hell out of the server it runs on. Perfect example of a not for shared hosting situation. Any reasonable person understands this, and when clients ask, I explain it the exact same way. They just don't like the "feel" of restriction. If a user has 5, 10, 20+ gigs worth of stuff, fine, I have a few of those as we speak.

Unlimited was the only word I could find to describe this, perhaps you have a better one? Unmetered, and Unrestricted have a similar feel to them, and mean pretty close to the same thing.

EDIT: on another note, most of the smaller sites between 2-3 gigs usually eat up the most cpu and ram resources. Because they are utilizing a website the way it should be done. Not just dumping a load of files on there and huge unoptimized images and data, etc. Getting real traffic and usage as a result.

 

[MikeTrike]

The Ferrari design rip-off is a little too blatant for me. The prose is pretty sad. Stuff like "No other web host out there meets our standards for support," is not compelling. "This one is easy, if it's free, web based, and it helps your business." doesn't make sense.

Cleaned up a bit, I am no copy writer, that's for sure. And I finally got our proper logo looking decent on there as well. On another note, I think Tonka uses a similar font to the Ferrari one. I do miss those things, when they were actually made of metal that is.

Can you blame me?


It also happened to be my new computer case

99.5% up time is more than an hour per month of downtime.

A number pulled out of thin air, updated, current month stats is 99.94% uptime on titan.

The site is very slow; five to eight seconds to load pages, which isn't impressive. You might try running YSlow or firebug to figure out where your problems are. At least part of the problem is that your code is very sloppy. You include the giant mootools header twice in a row, right on subsequent lines, for example. Lots of of whitespace, and no compression at all.

Both references of mootools pulled completely because it was used for that ugly menu slide thing. Also GZIP enabled.



On one final note, thanks to all of you with constructive things to say. It makes it easier to correct things, and it's hard to find people willing to provide useful info. So thanks again.

 

[mikeblas]

I'm kind of confused; the 99.5% number is the number you offer in your service guarantee. That was pulled out of thin air? Or something else was?

You're trying to establish your own brand identity, not copy someone else's.

The main page still references mootools. You're down to about 2500 milliseconds for me to load the main page, so it's getting better. I think the problem might be that you're using the zilla tracker, and the Google analytics tracker. They're both pretty slow.

 

[MikeTrike]

I'm kind of confused; the 99.5% number is the number you offer in your service guarantee. That was pulled out of thin air? Or something else was?

99.9% is the actual number as we have been able to maintain above 99.9% uptime. That was just an early # that was just thrown in there.

You're trying to establish your own brand identity, not copy someone else's.

Very true, I also agree with this one.

The main page still references mootools. You're down to about 2500 milliseconds for me to load the main page, so it's getting better. I think the problem might be that you're using the zilla tracker, and the Google analytics tracker. They're both pretty slow.

Yes those are slow for sure, I will be working on mootools first, not sure why thats still getting dumped in there. I'm sure I will figure it out in time, so far so good, thanks for the update.
EDIT: mootools solved, and required, may remove the front 1,2,3 slider thing though. Either way its running better with other stuff noted below removed.

 

[MikeTrike]

@mikeblas

Removed livezilla tracking, and implemented the legacy google tracking urchin.js and site loads dropped to under 3 seconds. Wow what an improvement, also what do you recommend for site stats as an analytics replacement?

2.8 Seconds on 1st load
1.7 Seconds on a refresh after cached.

 

[The Donut]

I think to make it your own, you need to change it up more from the originally Joomla Template.

Maybe some additional elements or something; otherwise it's just another Joomla site (ala this one).

Also when I look for hosting for myself or my business, if someone offers "unlimited" or "18TB" of disk space, I look elsewhere.

 

[MikeTrike]

I think to make it your own, you need to change it up more from the originally Joomla Template.

Maybe some additional elements or something; otherwise it's just another Joomla site (ala this one).

Also when I look for hosting for myself or my business, if someone offers "unlimited" or "18TB" of disk space, I look elsewhere.

We are working on a custom header to replace that entire 1, 2, 3 box at the top. As for the unlimited, can you think of a better term? We do not want to explicitly limit based on disk space or bandwidth. We are looking for honest understanding people that understand how this works. Which is why we put the "What is Unlimited Web Hosting? URL on the site. Including a bigger one on the unlimited hosting details page. We don't want multiple tiers for hosting packages, what we want is understanding clients who are looking for support, not to host a billion gigs of movies. It's just easier if there is one word to sum it up, and I have yet to find it, and nobody else has been able to help with that either. It also has to be a word that most people understand as well.

In other words we don't want to charge for overages. One month you might use 1GB of bandwidth, the next you might use 5GB, then you might only use 500MB, then 2GB, etc... We are going for an "open" web hosting solution. But I am no marketing guru as you can tell. I dont like the idea of selling 5GB of bandwidth when the user uses only 2 or 3 gigs of traffic monthly, then for some reason they use 8GB in a surge of traffic. Then what happens, we send them a big overage bill, which is not cool.

I guess our slogan could be "Use what you need, but don't be an idiot." I just don't think that goes over well from a marketing standpoint.

Are there any marketing guru's that may be able to help with this dilemma? Even if you are a private consultant on such marketing issues, please chime in and maybe we can arrange a paid chat.

 

[MikeTrike]

What are your thoughts on marketing it as "Open Web Hosting" based on my previous posts?