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Lester Hensley
Member
Username: lesterhensley

Post Number: 3
Registered: 07-2006
Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2006 - 03:31 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Dear All:
As a manufacturer of specified products and one of Colin's early company listers, I am always interested in how our website is serving the Specifier community. We have incorporated much of Colin's advise in our website and have found this discussion string of immense interest. I have always advocated an open and no-frills (and no log-in) website architecture and am pleased to see this preference reflected in your opinions. Thanks for your candor and keep it coming. Your candid criticisim of our site, should you have cause to visit it, would be gladly considered.
Lester Hensley, President/Owner, www.emseal.com
Nathan Woods, CCCA
Senior Member
Username: nwoods

Post Number: 104
Registered: 08-2005
Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2006 - 05:22 pm:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Mr. Hensley, thank you for participating in these forums, it is wonderful to see your desire to improve and grow and excel in this technologically competitive society.

Working in Architecture, I am familiar with your products, and use them on a regular basis. As a part time web designer on the side, I spent a few minutes today looking at your site. I will be candid per your request:

Your website is... not good. The homepage alone has a great many problems, ranging from fat images, obscure navigation, to extremely outdated HTML code practices. It has no fluidity to accommodate various screen widths, it completely fails the PDA access test, it is non-compliant with the US Governments Section 508 Accessibility requirements (http://www.section508.gov/), your links don't look like links, it does not print cleanly, and worst of all, it is s l o w....

If I had to guess, I would say that the core elements and design of your site is about 6 years old, and has not been worked on since then, other than to populate it with content.

There are a great many full time professional web designers that I could refer you to, that can bring your site up to modern web standards compliance, as well as provide a fresh new, flexible look to it.

Through my part time company, www.nextstepdesigns.com (note: my site is not very "web design" focused anymore :-), I would be willing to provide a detailed analysis of your entire site, providing a peer review and usability report, as well as aid in preparing a design programming document that could function as a master plan for modernizing your public presentation to the online world.

I apologize for being fairly blunt in my response, but I hope this helps you.

Regards

Nathan Woods, CCCA
Senior Construction Contract Administrator

AKA: part time web guy
www.nextstepdesigns.com
John Bunzick, CCS, CCCA
Senior Member
Username: bunzick

Post Number: 553
Registered: 03-2002
Posted on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 - 08:45 am:   Edit PostDelete PostPrint Post

Just as a counterpoint: Emseal's site was lickity-split when I browsed it. It uses no time-consuming but pointless flash graphics. Plus, it allowed me to use IE's tool to increase the text size (most web sites have this disabled) which is very helpful for those without perfect eyesite or a huge monitor. I had no trouble finding any product I chose to look for. Compared to many sites, it looks okay to me.

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