New Look For SEO Guy

[morgan]

Well guys its my turn, take a look at the new SEO Guy Services website if you would, http://www.seo-guy.com Not to concerned about the SEO just want to get opinions on the look so far and how Brian (My designer) and I can improve it.

Be as brutal (Or constructive) as possible thanks gang
Cheers

[ShawnWalters]

I like the design a lot! Btw, just curious, for an seo company whats the car logo image stand for/represent?

[morgan]

Thats my car,
In marketing you need an association device, a name, phrase or symbol. When people think of me they generally remembre me by name, however if they dont as soon as they hit my site they go OHHHHHH! SEO Guy! Now I remember the guy with the car. I dont drive the car yet but I will muahah.

Also the logo with the crosshairs plays into it because the car is actually a austin martin v12 vanquish driven by james bond, thus the crosshairs which represent targeting and the globe with the sights plays into my new slogan "Targeting the world" and then targeting gets into SEO and kw's etc so make a long story short I need to go to be lol

[Kevin 11]

Very nice looking desing. A lot cleaner and more pro looking than the last site. Design isn't everything, but if you can afford to look stellar than go for it!

By the way, I found the site navigation architecture of your last site a little difficult. I'm sure the new site will address this also.

Kevin 11

[morgan]

Yup, I'll be honest I wrote and built the last site in less then a week, was kind of a spur of the moment thing lol. I decided I didnt want to work for an SEO company that paid me less than 3% to generate 100% of their profits so I quit lol.

I was so busy so fast once word got out about me leaving that I never got a chance to get back to my site lol weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[SPARKO]

The site looks great; must be difficult trying to put all that content n keywords on a single page but it looks a lot better. You missed my frontpage link tho ! lol how did I ever find this place when British spell optimization optimisation ? well done Morgan and co. Can you view it in all browsers >?

[irish_ladie]

Hi Morgan..............

Like it better then the old one.......but a few comments

- 1st time I loaded this page the logo took three and a half minutes to appear - I would have been long gone if it was'nt your site!
- Then I was asked if I wanted to install Macromedia - I dont like things asking me to install things to view a site (it of course asks on every page) - this may scare some people
- The logo for me personally is too big........I hate scrolling down a page to read information
- The logo is talking up half the page
- The top navigation is disappearing to the left and I cant read your first link - have a screen shot I can email if you like
- There is a white line a few lines down from the top nav which is protuding on both sides and does not look nice or professional
- The top navigation when you rollover having a hard time trying to click the links underneath... sometimes when I point to them they are gone (not really gone but sort of disappearing
- To be honest I dont really like the top nav I personally prefer more straight forward

You said to be brutally honest...

I have emailed you the screen shot.

Cheers

[RideQ]

Thanks Irish Ladie,

I Am going to add a bit of Flash to my site, and was concerned about the load up messages, if my visitor does not have flash,

I realize the question does not belong here, so will post it on the propper board.

PS-Morgan, the site looks good, but I feel that Flash does not allways help out a site, to me it can be intimidating at times.

For Instance- you know how you can look for somthing to eat, and not want to spend allot of money. So you drive around and make your dessision based on how the place looks , wether or not it is exspensive.

I think the same of course is done on web sites.

To me flash is used allot to hype a product or service up. And it just tends to overhype certain services. For instance, if I was looking for a home mortgage, and I found a flash intense site, I dont think It really helps build confidence in there product.

But hey, I am just learning this stuff. :rolleyes:

[morgan]

These are great comments guys and exactly what I need. Irish lady thanks for the screen shot, it doesnt render that way on any of our browsers that I have seen so far, firefox / mozilla or IE so you finding that is great as Im sure many others see the same thing, we are working on it now.

The flash, although not always everyones favourite was a decision I made because truthfully I am starting to go after bigger fish, I have a meeting with ADOBE on Monday! So I wanted to portray a very high end image and this leads to your point ride quality about shopping around and looking for things that are price comparative I want my site to look expensive becaues I truly am expensive so I dont want to waste others time. As you know yourself if there are small jobs to be done I would sooner just give you the free advise and help you do it yourself here at the forum then try to bleed a few thousand dollars a month out of a startup. My reasoning for this is when my advise does pay off and you start making lots of $$$ and need to take on the big words in your market then you come back and instantly pay the big bucks without a question because I have already proven myself.

Irish lady, for the information pages and tutorial pages etc (The ones where I dont sell myself I have really thought about toning it down to just a photoshop image (Of amazing quality of course) that is much less deep so that the information is more accessible and the flashy stuff isnt there. Also I will try to write a script or find one that if you dont have flash enabled browsers or you dont have flash installed you can just get a photoshop pic like my old site, however I will have to superimpose some sort of text link navigation alternative to the xml flash buttons at the top.

Ride as far as "overhyping" with the flash, that is why I dont have the images doing anything else past the intro, I based my concept off of a site I have extreme respect for www.macromedia.com obviously esthetically we have different tastes but I love their delivery and I certainly will try my best with my designers to increase load times and things like that. My main competition is seoinc.com <<< no anchor text ya bastard, and they have a flash site which is higher end looking (Although I think its ugly) but seriously when it comes down to choosing for big companies its usually me, seoinc and Iprospect so I have to make a good showing.

The efficiency of the site is no where near optimized (As far as load times etc) as its being developed and again more and more brutally honest comments are welcome I want this site to please as many people as possible.

Oh yeah suggestions are good as well, we are just woring on a box that dynamically posts the top 5 threads from the forum and that will be imlemented shortly, a programmer was having some trouble with the code and made a comment and irish lady did so much digging she actual found the test page heh, I make sure people dont swear in test simulators from now on ma dear :-)

[melaniejk]

Hi Morgan.
Ooo, ahh. Very fancy. I like the new flash intro. Very cool.
It loaded very quickly (broadband).

I like the look of the whole page. Very masculine looking, which is great for SEO GUY. :)

But, I don't really care for the way the main titles look (the font or color).
It makes it a bit difficult to read. It's readable, but it's not easy to look at.
Title: WELCOME TO SEO GUY
Title: Our SEO COMPANY
Title: SEO GUY FORUM
Just my humble opinion.

I did get an error on the bottom of the page:

Warning: main(footer_links.inc): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/morgan3/public_html/index.php on line 208

Warning: main(): Failed opening 'footer_links.inc' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/tmp') in /home/morgan3/public_html/index.php on line 208


Great new look!

Sincerely,
Melaniejk

[melaniejk]

I really like the big flash picture up top.
The size really catches your attention.

Sincerely,
Melaniejk

[leeds1]

That is kinda groovy Morgan. I have to say I liked the old site better with the darker backgrounds - it was completely different from everyone else.

But the intro - superb

BTW, for all you non UK residents the car is an ASTON MARTIN not

a austin martin v12 vanquish

Austin was an old english marque but not any more

[beats]

Hey everyone, BTW I'm a freelance designer that just started working for Morgan (Not much of an SEOer just yet, but I'm slowly on my way :) ).

First off, I have to say this new design looks soooooooo much better. Very cool. It's also much easier to read. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the older site had white colored text on a purple background right? Generally inverting a large body of text like that is something that kills the readability of a website. (Perhaps this is something for less-design-inclined to take note off ;) ).

I think this an awesome new look for the market you want to a part of. Being a designer myself, I know I'm a little biased towards sites with nicer designs... but personally, when I see big money making companies with crappy looking websites it makes me curious just how credible they are. Especially when they are offering internet services. Of course there are cases where companies sacrifice design/flash for usability, functionality etc. However statistics at Macromedia (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/) show that 98% of internet users today are able to view flash content. You're going for the big dogs, and with the money they're paying you know they'll have machines that can load your site content.

Now it's time for the not-so complementary comments.

Unless there is a specific reason for using this alien-looking font, then I agree with melaniejk, the tiltle font has to go. The site is so nice and modern looking, but the titles look almost video-game like, and it takes aways from the overall design. I think you should go for a nice condensed font.

The flash is neat, however some cool sounds would really bring it to life. If you are worried about usability then maybe you should provide an alternative header in .jpg format for the people that don't like flash.

I hate the right hand column. I think it's the navigation there that's bugging me; those buttons really suck. Also, the boxes at the bottom that say "SEO tutorial & SEO resources", those really need to be tweaked.

Other than that I'm quite impressed with the look of it.

Hope you guys can be just as harsh or harsher if I ever ask for critiques :)

[zagro]

When I looked at your rankings for 'the' most competitive kw, your site's PR and the kind of advice you gave on your site and this forum, I knew you were #1 for SEO.

When I looked at your site's design... It just DIDN'T portray that message... It didn't look professionally designed and as I said you really had to go to the content and look at the rankings to realize there was a professional behind that site.

With the new design it is much much better but you're not there yet (IMO of course ;) ). That car is still TOO BIG. Who cares about the meaning of it when it looks so tacky and so teenage poster (am I being too rough here? :confused: )

[QUOTE=Kevin 11]By the way, I found the site navigation architecture of your last site a little difficult. I'm sure the new site will address this also.

Kevin 11[/QUOTE]

I agree 100% with Kevin 11, the first time I browsed the site I thought that probably on page optimization had 'damaged' easy navigation. The content though was SO GREAT that I kept clicking and clicking to make sure I didn't lost a page, but I was never sure!

Hope this helps and by the way thanks a lot for the way you share your knowledge with the rest of us.

[morgan]

HAHA noone is ever to rough all your comments are appreciated please keep them coming, this site is a work in progress still so be assured your comments are taken very seriously and very valuable thanks guys poor it on we want to have the best site possible
Cheers

[ScottW]

Morgan,

Not sure if you know this, so I'll just mention it.

There's a way to load a JPEG in place of the Flash if the user doesn't have Flash installed. It requires the use of on-page javascript so if you're not using it because of that then just ignore this message. If you'd like/need more info, PM me.

-Scott