Show HN: Criticize our website
qawba.com
qawba.com
By the way, marketing yourselves to people that will pay you handsomely for professional services and then putting an ad for a $4.99 template at the bottom is a dumb idea.
* The background image is too dark, couldn't see what it is without having to adjust the angle of my laptop screen
* The "carousel" is a bad practice in general, and in your site many visitors won't even notice there is one, as it doesn't look like one.
* SEO: There's no meta description, openGraph, twitter cards tags (like in many other websites. We're almost in 2015, what are people thinking about?
* Copywriting: find a native English-speaker to fix things.
* the License page has not enough content
* good thing: the highly noticeable call to action "Start a project with us"
> Qawba is a group of developers, IT professionals, and graphic designers that works for the creation of websites, templates, the logo, posters and banners as well as the maintenance and updating of websites.
The "that works for" here could probably be changed to soemthing better.
> We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies.
Has a missing word, and the "extensive profiles" feels a bit odd.
Also the Brand Identity section feels a bit fragmented, and I felt "brand identity" is mentioned far too many times. Feels a bit like it was written for search engines.
There is also a space missing after one of the full stops...
> Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand
Overall I feel maybe the tone of the website could be a bit more personal. It starts off feeling personal but then the "Who we are" section seems to mix perspectives, beginning in the third person.
I'm no copywriter though, nor am I an expert in English although I am a native speaker. My own website probably isn't perfect either!
By using the English language for your website, you are targeting English speaking customers. If a potential customer knows English and notices your mistakes, then you're giving them good reason to not trust you to build their website.
Examples:
> identity.Through
You forgot the space after the period.
> our experts are complemented to the latest technology.
This makes no sense.
> We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies.
You need a noun after "highly qualified" such as "highly qualified engineers" or "highly qualified professionals". The prepositional phrase "with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies" makes no sense.
There are more examples, but I don't want to be overly critical. English is a difficult language to learn, even for people who grow up in English speaking countries. Hiring a native English speaker to do proofreading for you should really help improve the quality of your text while also helping you to learn the language better.
"012. PEOPEL THINK SECTION"
"Backstrech - https://github.com/srobbin/jquery-backstretch"
BACKSTRECH??
One would expect a better level of attention to detail from professional designers. This is disqualifying. BTW I'm not even a native speaker, but these typos simply jump out at you.
"Copyright © 2012 ... All Rights Reserved."
- Information density is low... results in a lot of scrolling for small amounts of information. Initial page load "above the fold" offers very little.
- Lose the mystery meat navigation for "Web design and UI" and "Web Development" (in the "Brand Identity" section) in favor of text labels, or simply blend that content into the rest of the page.
- While lots of padding/margin is a trend, everything feels so incredibly far apart that it's completely disconnected; maybe a symptom of my 1920x1080 resolution. It's impossible to find something specific (for example, social media links).
- You made me load ASCII art when the page loaded! It should be removed, however small the additional data transfer might seem. Also remove the other commented HTML such as the ids bannerVideo and our-work.
- It feels like "Who we are" is important and should go first, or alongside "Brand Identity".
- Enable compression!
I like the full page effect of the home screen and the text that follows. Maybe have an image in the whitespace like on the contact page? Speaking of, the contact page seems weird to me kind of like it doesn't follow a grid and the typographs looks off to me.
The links at the end should be actual links and not just the circles that are clickable.
License is spelled wrong in the footer.
Cheers.
That's a valid British spelling.
Contact: Have you seen this when the page isn't super-wide? It's as above but twice as high. 800px between form and submit button. AWFUL.
Home, second pane: Dump the mystery meat navigation. It's cute that you found a few font-awesome glyphs that you liked but they mean nothing to visitors. Navigation shouldn't be pot luck.
There's also no call to action. If I land on the home page, you need to tell me what I can do and what you'd like me to do.
And it looks like a turd if you turn javascript off. Make sure you don't rely on Javascript to display information. It'll cost you business if your JS ever breaks.
And yeah, the whole thing needs cleaning up. It looks like a dev build. In production you want to losslessly recompress your images (optipng, jpegoptim, etc), strip your HTML down (tidy), minify your JS and CSS and pre-gzip everything that's static.
I also always think 'agency' websites without bios and staff photos are basically run by a few 13 year olds. Not a bad thing, but this feeling is compounded by lack of postal address or telephone number. If you have an office, put it on there. Nobody will call or visit, it just makes people feel safer.
As of right now, it: - Spreads very little information across an enormous space - Has nothing aesthetically engaging
This means that I feel like you'll make my brand also a sparse and unattractive idea.
I realize this is a design trend lately, but the loading threw me off and I personally think it wastes a ton of screen real estate.
There's also http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png
The site is very dark. You can hardly see the image in the background with all the black.
Move the example products (like the 4.99 fakia landing page) closer to the top.
The site design is not original and others have done it better. If brand identity is important then perhaps you should put some effort into it.
Far too much whitespace and don't be afraid to use colours.
"Market Qawba: Premium themes to make your things elegant"
Surely there's a more specific word than "things"