Twinlight Designs

[cdingman]

Hey all -

Take a look at our site and let me know what you think.

http://www.twinlightdesigns.com

[alvo]

Another site with no contrast. If you want people to read you stuff you should make it easy to read. Light blue on white just doesn't invite people to read anything. I know that low contrast text is the designey thing these days, but if it sacrifices legibility, then what's the point?

Google ads on business site always mystify me. Why, if you're a successful business, would you want to run ads for your competition on your site (remember they're targeted to the text on your page which is about what you do)? And why, again if you're a successful business would you need the pennies they bring in? They just seem to give the site an amateurish feel.

Justified text leaves large gaps in places that looks crude. Unless you have wide enough text blocks to spread out the spacing (which you don't have here), you should make the text blocks ragged right.

Home page has too much "happy text" ... stuff that isn't important and doesn't say much to a visitor. You should cut the text byh at least half, more if you can, and make it short, concise and to-the-point. People don't read web pages, they scan them. Giving them very short chunks of text is the best way to encourage them to read something. The longer text is, the harder it is to read, and the harder something is to do, the less people tend to do it (same principle applys to contrast).

The staff profiles (and you should think about deleting the "Our staff profiles are provided below." line that's just above the staff profiles) are a bit odd. Nobody has a last name? That made me stop and wonder why they aren't given. I'd think they'd be proud to be associated with the work they do. Then there is the unexplained "Website" link for each of them. Is that their personal website? Or maybe work they did? And if it's work, don't you guys work as a team--as a company? I clicked on Kelly's website link to see what it was and got an animation with the odd reading "Skip intro and proceed here or here." with the two heres being mystery links to unknown places. Not the kind of website work I'd want done for me. Didn't look any further. Then I clicked on the web link for Chris and wow! What a horrible mess.

Went then to the pricing page. Saw flyers for $5-$10 and a "view examples here" link that didn't lead to any examples. Instead I was on the "Designs" page. I skipped past the Faded-Glitter.net since I'd already encountered it, and went down to the Graphics area. I clicked on the Ricky Hendrick link and got an image that was nice except that there was text right across the face in the image. It seems an odd design choice at first, but then when I realized it read "Twinlight Designs" it seems really odd. Why would you watermark an example of your work? You're afraid someone is going to steal it? Is that more important than showcasing your work?

I was about to leave the page when I looked around for more stuff to comment on and saw the explaination of where to click to see what. This is something that as a normal visitor I would never have read. I would have done exactly as I did this time, click on the image. Since I now knew that the image and the caption under it are links to different places I went to the Hendrick site and noticed that the featured graphic I saw earlier was nowhere on the site. "Why is that?" I wondered.

Sorry, but at this point, if I were actually looking for a design company to do work for me, I'd be clicking on those Google ads to find someone else.

You've got a lot of stuff to fix, but then again, once you do so you should be able to raise your prices.