Website Feedback

[Superlyte27]

Guys, I'm very new at website design. I'm wondering any of you can give me tips or tricks to tweaking this. Any advice is wanted. I've never touched the designing of a website before last week, and hoping for some good insight.

One specific question I have is:

If the host crashes, do I lose all the work I did creating it.
Should I make a direct apparent link to the photos, instead of a hard to find link in the About Us section.

Bare in mind, there's still alot to be completed. Not all of the links and descriptions are done, but I think I've gotten a solid start on it.

Be honest. I can take it. Thanks.
Underwater Adventures Ultimate Cave Diving - Home

 

[Cave Diver]

I think the site looks pretty good. Very impressive for a first attempt.

Can't answer your host question, but I would personally prefer seeing a direct link to photos.

 

[Superlyte27]

Yah, I gotta agree with you. I'm not getting much traffic on the photos. I'm guessing people just aren't finding them. I have more people hitting the Contact Us page. LOL

 

[vladimir]

Very nice site. The home page has good visual impact and is neatly organized. Your editor (not you, I'm guessing ) did a great job--it is unusual for me not to find a few errors (without getting too nitpicky). I agree that a direct link to the photos (which are fabulous) from the home page is a good idea.

My personal website is published using Apple's iWeb. A copy resides on my computer if my host should ever crash. I used to use FrontPage and it worked the same way.

Business must be good--an hour and fifteen minutes for lunch? I take mine at my desk.

 

[Superlyte27]

Actually, I am the editor. So thank you.

 

[scubamarketing]

Guys, I'm very new at website design. I'm wondering any of you can give me tips or tricks to tweaking this. Any advice is wanted. I've never touched the designing of a website before last week, and hoping for some good insight.

One specific question I have is:

If the host crashes, do I lose all the work I did creating it.
Should I make a direct apparent link to the photos, instead of a hard to find link in the About Us section.

Bare in mind, there's still alot to be completed. Not all of the links and descriptions are done, but I think I've gotten a solid start on it.

Be honest. I can take it. Thanks.
Underwater Adventures Ultimate Cave Diving - Home

Typically, if a host crashes, it comes back up and all of your work should still be on their server. That being said, it never hurts to have backup copies of your site. I store all of mine in a folder in Dropbox so I can A) access them anywhere and B) have them even if my laptop blows up.

As everyone else has said, more photos, easier to find is always good (it looks like you may have made an update here already since posting). One idea: host your photos on a 3rd party service like 500px, Smugmug or Flickr and use one of the variety of slideshow embed options on your site. This will create a little bit prettier (not to say yours isn't) presentation of the photos, but most importantly it will speed up your site load time and decrease bandwidth usage on your hosting account.

Okay, now for the nit-picky. I've been designing websites forever, so I think I have an idea of the kinds of things to look for. Overall, I am very very impressed with your site. So the list I'm about to provide is super nit-picky, but also fairly easy to fix if you agree with my ideas:

1. Be careful on your header image watermark. If you want it to actually protect, pick a color that stands out more. If you don't care so much, remove it because it's distracting.
2. Change the Facebook Like button text color to something that can be seen. That text shows how many other people have liked your page. That is referred to as social proof and when people see it (especially as the number gets larger), they're more likely to click themselves which means more promotion for your site.
3. On your courses page, do something to make each class stand out from the others. Either change the course titles to a (more significantly) different color or add a horizontal line between each row. Make it easy for people to pick each class out from the others, they flow a little too much together currently.
4. Put the course prices on the course description pages. People are lazy and don't want to have to hit back. Also, put a nice call to action on each class page ("Register today!")
5. On the rental gear page, consider what I suggested on your course overview page - create space between each item somehow
6. Save your Rental Agreement as a PDF, not everyone has Word or wants to download a Doc file. While this group is admittedly small, why turn people off by sending them a file they can edit. Honestly, ditch the download entirely and just put those terms on the page. I was expecting a full page rental agreement, not 3 sentences that really don't require a document download.
7. "PayPal" in your navigation isn't that intuitive. Why would a dive center/instructor be promoting PayPal? Consider something like "reserve a space", "book a class" or something that's more direct in what PayPal will actually be DOING for your site visitor.

Again, just a few little minor things, but otherwise awesome site and incredible photos!

Very nice site. The home page has good visual impact and is neatly organized. Your editor (not you, I'm guessing ) did a great job--it is unusual for me not to find a few errors (without getting too nitpicky). I agree that a direct link to the photos (which are fabulous) from the home page is a good idea.

My personal website is published using Apple's iWeb. A copy resides on my computer if my host should ever crash. I used to use FrontPage and it worked the same way.

Business must be good--an hour and fifteen minutes for lunch? I take mine at my desk.

Time to start looking for an alternative to iWeb, it will be phased out it sounds like next year: Steve Jobs Confirms Discontinuation of iWeb in iCloud Transition - Mac Rumors