Hi Michael,

When you say basic I think that you should give yourself more credit. You have created a web site which is designed correctly to suit your target audience. You have laid out exactly as you should used relevant imagary and given a clear concise image of your business. If this is your first web site maybe you should reconsider your carrer choice .

Just a couple of constructives. White on black is crisp and impressive, however it blurs at the edges for anyone whose eyesight is not 100%. If you want to stick with it I'd suggest trying a very light grey. The colour schemes on the contact form are worse in that way and the green in that seems out of context. The same light grey or white as a background with a dark font would be much easier on the eye.

Outside of that though, nice one.
Cheers
John
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www.beta2b.com

Hi

The website is quite nice, I agree with a few of the things Beta2b has said, though it does look like it is made with a website builder so not sure how much you can change.

The site does have great information and certainly delivers your business well, my only concern is that it is completley made from flash, a lot of people would say this isn't the best thing for seo. That said at the moment your not on your own domain so not sure if that is a concern.

Overall i think it's a great job, good well structured information, nice design and a pleasant website.
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Security Vacancies | Security Jobs | Security Jobs London

Hi John and Tony,

Wow - really didn't expect such good feedback! Will definatly take on board what you have both said.

John do you mean the green background in the contact form or the text? I will change that background as it looks a bit tacky anyway.

Tony with regards to the website being made from flash, when I started making the website I was more concerned with the image (and didn't know much about seo). To be honest seo seems to be something I will find hard to get my head around, any useful links would be very helpful.

Thanks again guys

Michael

The text box background medium dark green is the offending color.

When Google reads your web site it is looking for (amongst many things) the text on your pages and the internal navigation (About Us, Home Page etc) so that it can get an idea of what you are about and where & what the different pages are. Google has recently been upgraded so that it can glean some of this from flash, but it reads HTML without a problem so if your text content and/or navigation is done with flash you are not in the most tennable position to be properly noticed by the web crawler wereas all HTML content will work fine.

Looking at your source you appear to have put all of your content and navigation in HTML, but I have never worked with flash & I'm unlikely to so I don't know if you have somehow wrapped the HTML in flash in some way that will cloak it from the crawlers. Maybe Tony or one of the other programmers can answer that?

In the meantime you may want to take a look at these:

http://www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk/seo-blog/site-architecture/why-is-using-flash-bad-for-seo.html

http://www.pandia.com/index.html

The second one is quite a large site so it's worth exploring. It's lots of advice on seo.

Cheers
John
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www.beta2b.com

Hi Michael,

Nice one, The design is good and I think you should make it global, Then you should move towards SEO as it will help a lot to gain higher ranking on search engines.
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Pacific Infotech UK Ltd. is a professionally managed company providing website design London Services, search engine optimization (SEO) & IT support services, and has a long list of satisfied customers in the United Kingdom and USA.

http://www.pacificinfotech.co.uk/

John - I have changed the green background to white, definatly looks better. I will read through those links and hopefully begin to understand the confusing world of SEO!

Pacificuk - Thanks for the compliment! I do plan to make it live with a proper domain name etc. I have a viewer count on their so will judge the amount of visits site is getting as I begin to advertise it.

Regards

Michael

Just a really quick bit of feedback. The site looks quite good. Do think some of the images look a bit strecthed an pixelated.
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(Accounting Help)
www.accounting-help.co.uk

Hi Michael

I think the site looks very professional, great concept and easy to navigate.

I personally don’t like sites that loads, but this sites load very quickly.

One thing I have spotted on the “Jobs we do” page under the “Handyman section “the word decorating is spelt incorrectly.


Great site, best of luck

Jannet
www.freshasadaisycards.com
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Jannet Ellis
www.freshasadaisycards.com

Hi Jannet,

Thank you for your kind words.

One bad thing about the site builder I used was it had no spell-checker, so it was quite easy to miss the odd little spelling mistake - thanks for pointing that one out for me!

Regards

Michael

Hi Michael,

Well done! As a web developer, I've developed quite a few websites but not all of them as well presented as yours.

Good job with the design. Only two development related suggestions:

1. Once you get a proper domain name, don't just forward it over but make sure the entire website is hosted within a wrapper on your domains home folder for SEO purposes. You'll be able to upgrade your site in the future to a better platform without having to send your people a new link.

2. Consider converting your website from Wix/Flash to PHP/HTML for the site and Javascript for the header. Non flash websites are more easily viewed by your audience and handy for folks with iPhones and iPads.

You are welcome to contact me if you are ever in need of advice.

Cheers!

Jason
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Professional Website Hosting for Startups - http://StarterNetworks.com

Hi Jason,

Sorry for delay in replying - just got back from a short break away.

Thanks a lot for the feedback - very constructive. Would you mind if I did ask you a couple of questions about you're advice, this is very new and all rather confusing to me!

Cheers

Michael

Just started on this forum, but the site is very clean.
Flash is not the future, but it gives a professional image, and shows people that you care about the work you are willing to put into the site.
As a business, first impressions can mean life or death, and you do a pretty good job at portraying a good first impression.
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http://insidefame.com
http://plugtrade.com
http://wellerit.com

Wix, because it uses flash, is probably not the best builder for a website if you want people to be able to find it using Google.

Flash sites don't display on mobile devices very well either. Many more people are accessing the web on the move these days. If your site doesn't look quality on an iphone, smartphone or tablet, then you may have wasted your time making it look good on a PC/Laptop. I suspect your customer base includes busy professionals. Best hope they look you up on their office PC !

Website builders are easy to use for lay people and using their templates you can get a pleasing result but in essence, you are only producing a web based brochure to SEND PEOPLE TO (using traditional marketing, adverts , word of mouth, referrals, business cards etc), which is really only 10% of the job. Once a week I get people who have built their own websites coming to me to ask why it's not producing business. Inevitably it's because Google doesn't like the site. There can be a 101 reasons for that

I like the way you have singled yourself out as different from the rest, but you haven't done it on the home page. It's all there on your 'charges' and 'about us' pages. You have quite rightly laid out several FEATURES why you are different (e.g. no call out) , and the BENEFIT (saving you money). But you need to SELL the BENEFITS. People buy BENEFITS not features and they want to know that if they buy you, what's in it for them. Move your benefits to your HOME page. Another example of a feature. 'Unlike most of our rivals we do not use sub-contractors or agency staff - all of our staff are fully vetted, experienced employees.' the benefit (perhaps) being 'You have the peace of mind that as a one stop, we are fully accountable for our own work'

Get rid of the phrase 'welcome to'.

For all those on this post commenting about the site being seen by google, I refer you to my comments above. If anybody has reasoned arguments against what I said then please share it for the benefit of everybody on this forum.

Further - neilhwilliams, please let us all know what is wrong with ths site that google won't find it, I can't see anything in the source that will avert the google crawlers. Again, we will all benefit.

Just looked at this site on my android samsung galaxy s2 phone and it looks fine. Has anybody who has commented about viewing via mobile looked at it on a mobile device? If so, please comment on what device you used and how it looked. That way we can all learn more about cross-device issues.

Michael - the numerous comments here about how awful flash is are relatively well reasoned. In the absence of any of the comments that I have just requested here though what you have shown is the exception to that rule. Don't be confused by it all, reasoned discussion points are the ones that will offer you the most, the others are not very helpful until they are given reason.

Cheers
John
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www.beta2b.com

Off_icial - Thank you for the kind feedback, I really appreciate it.

neilhwilliams - Thank you for the very detailed analysis, I'm really picking up great info from this kind of response. With regards to the site being flash, when I put it together I didn't actually understand the complications/restrictions that flash can cause. It's now my main priority to be able to overcome the limitations.

I agree with the homepage advice too, I will change it to make the features/benefits visual as soon as soon as you log on.

Beta2B - Thanks again, it's nice to hear some positive feedback in regards to flash website success, really glad you could access it via mobile phone without problems. Mobile device access was one of my main priorities so this is step in the right direction for me.

Has anybody else tried to log on via mobile device?.

I like the site i think it has a great profile and delivers a good strong message, there are drawbacks from having a site built from flash such as SEO, for example supposedly google doesn't read the content of the flash and so it doesn't get the keywords etc. Though i am no SEO professional and so do not know how accurate that is.