Review: Castaliahomes.com

[garriours]

Hi, to all forum members.
Review site - castaliahomes.com.
I am interested in your opinion about the design of the site. Perhaps it needs to be improved. Maybe add more information about company etc?

Any criticism is more than welcome.
Thank you

[traxport121]

The layout and design can be improved a hell lot.
- Logo is not very impressive
- Navigation background should be plain :/
- Use Sans-Serif fonts

Overall rating: 2/10

[ivedtara]

The navigation menu on left is nice but the background image makes it a bit hard to read and looks cramped. The logo should be positioned on the left corner of the page.

[kostya572]

Your site is very simple. I don't like your menu, especially background image.

[bocaj]

I would agree that the menu background image is distracting. I also reccomend that you make some sort of border around your page, especially on the right/bottom as it currently just has white space. It is hard to read the very thin column to the right where there are only a few words per line. It would be easier if you made it wider so the reader doesn't have to change lines so often or you could just move the whole thing below your images and then use larger images.

[blasphemy]

There is no footer. Currently it looks like broken page with some error, or not parsed to the end. Make footer and put there some information about copyrrights, some address info (from left menu), anything that make use know that this is the end of the page.

And, of course, font have to be replaced. In 'The Building Process' you have Times New Roman, in 'Design Center' you have Georga. Choose one font for content, and adjust better line hight.

Background image for menu make menu hard to read.

[sammiess]

Looks unprofessional
- old design (these design are from 2000's)
- very hard to read menu (there you need more contrast)

Why you don't use a modern Joomla or Wordpress theme (that you can find for free) or just inspire from templatemonster?

[jakoob]

It was a ugly site.
logo - bad
menu - hard to read

1/10

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Boy, some of you need to consider that you could be the person on the other side of the monitor reading these nasty reviews without constructive improvement suggestions.

I am assuming you are a DIY webmaster,

Logo
Not horrible (have seen worse).

Slideshow on Home Page
Unique in that people usually have all the images positioned the same way. Maybe slow down the rotation. I'm finding it a bit fast.

Side Navigation
I would have to agree the background image in the side navigation is making it hard to read the menu but I get why you tried this. Maybe move it over on the right on it's own and make the navigation colum a bit smaller in width?

Your side navigation uses images. Search engines don't read images, yet. So for improved SEO rethink using images with text in them for the navigation. You could recycle the item background circle and the on mouseover image switch.

All your navigation should use absolute links for better SEO. i.e. http://www.domainname.com/page.htm

You have also missed the added SEO benefit of using the link title attribute.

Page Names
You have some of your pages named page2.html for example. Not good for SEO. These need to be named with a keyword or two that is what the page is about.

Footer
Yes you need a footer complete with contact information. This is an opportunity to add usability to each page should the user decide to print out your page to give you a call later if they are doing research for their home construction and collecting contractors to contact for a bid. It also helps with your local SEO.

Headings
You haven't used the heading tags available for added SEO and usability.

Pages with List of Links
You have some pages with lists of links. So these do not look like link farm pages introductions and descriptions for the links need to be added.

Coding
You have used some antiquated coding and quite a bit of inline styling. Cleaning up the old coding and moving your styling to an external stylesheet will improve the download speed of the pages plus make it easier the maintain in the future.

Google has a PDF: Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide you could read.

[ScriptMan]

I like your navigation section but it is way too busy. It does what you intended and looks sharp but busy. IMO it detracts from the rest of your page Not sure what would look the best in the final result but I would try more width for the entire page, adding some transparency to the navigation picture to fade it down a bit.

Html's post above is most informative.

I also agree that you need a footer to make the page look finished.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

OP has not been back since mid July. Nor have they returned to this thread to acknowledge people's observations.

Topic closed.

HTMLBasicTutor
Moderator