Need Your Opinion Please!

[zwendkos]

Hey guys, I need your opinion on the website design of this site that I have been charged with improving. I did not design it (god no) but will be working on it in the future:

http://maildogmanager.com/

What is your overall assessment and what needs to improve the most? My feelings are that it is extremely busy and doesn't easily convey what Mail Dog does (it's an email marketing company, essentially the same as constant contact, etc.). Very convoluted, IMO.

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions/put-downs would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance! :vampire:

[Zeke]

HIya.

One thing that's a problem is the quotes on the left Nav bar. Instead of fading into the next quote it momentarily enlargers the current quote, then fades into the next quote.
It looks glitchy, I would try and fix that.

I think the side nav bar is too large. It almost looks like an AD on the website itself. I think you are right about the concept not speaking to the customer. For starters there are alot of image icons about, such as the Tool, the Phone(top right corner), the price tag, the arrow, but only one small "letter" being held by the dog.
I would suggest expanding on the "letter" image, and perhaps ditching the side nav images, or atleast making them less dominate.

The real killer is the side nav bar. Make it smaller, add more emphasis(new material) about emails(such as new images with a dog and mail or something like that) and also emphasis the content area. I don't see a dominate title section, even in here http://maildogmanager.com/home_tools.html

I mean I see the header section "Mail dog Tools" but it disappears with the color scheme and the in company AD that is behind it. Infact, the setup is pretty bad. It's not good when the user has to scroll down to view the content of the page, unless that content surpasses the inital view. When I click a link, half of the screen is taken up with with the massive in ad image.

And again the side nav doesn't connect with the content section really.

But it has lots of promise :D just needs some tweaking. As far as the codeing goes, sorry I can't offer any advice. (new to it)

Gl with it :)