Sadoun Home page review

[Sadoun]

Anything you would recommend we should improve on our homepage at http://sadoun.com/ ?

Your suggestions & comments are welcome.

[rainman]

I like your home page the way it is very easy to navigate.

[brentb636]

I concur with Rainman. I am constantly linking to the Sadoun site for information on hardware, installation , etc. It's easy to navigate and has a breadth of information that I haven't found anwhere else.

[elgemcdlf]

Ok gonna keep it simple and small in concept As to navigation I do not think fair to ask those of us to comment of course that makes finding comments rough It would be easy to navigate to anyone who was familiar with it as with any other site.

I would build a small bar across the top just below the logo and put the links (text) that are listed in the top right corner in that bar. Add "Email this page to a friend" to the bar. Move the search to the left column perhaps on the top of the column. Place the newsletter join in the right column somewhere.

Move your logo to the top right corner, the phone number to the top left corner complete with the text below it except I would break the text into 2 even lines and center below the phone number. Get rid of the second Sadoun Satellite Sales image. This should leave an open area in the center or roughly from 1/3 to 3/4 across the top. Use this area for either a rotating specials display area or a news area (example being the Aljazeera info in the right side).

This should clean up the head area considerably without losing any content. Move the questions phone number image to the bottom of the page with address and hours info.

Ok I am shutting up now

[boroda1]

I reported once that it was hard to find "Bargain Bin"
I had the same problem again last week!
I suggest to put all the information about discounts, promotions and Bargain bin all togehter. It's not "Other Links", it's that honey pot and should appear somewhere on top. Also, you have got a blog now and you can put a link to that blog (read "news") together with contact info.
You can change link name "info" into "FAQ" and make these links more visible.
Page, IMHO, suffers from too many small links. It's better to have bigger ones, but recursing. From the other hand, it's more convenient to find everything just from start page, so, I don't know, maybe, it's better to leave everything as it is

[pictureon]

There is a link on the index page that does not do anything (Browse by product)

Home page is too long. I would consider arranging products in folders that open subfolders only when you click them. Also categorize some similar options in one folder (payment options, order tracking, ... could go under customer support folder, for example)

[elgemcdlf]

Here is a start of what I was trying to explain with the head. I would change all the blues in this head to match the blue of the Sadoun logo. I would cut away the "Sadoun Satellite Sales" from below the sat dish and bring the dish in behind the left side of the remaining logo. Aligned with the bottom of the text. Once that was accomplished it would open up the center for placement of a specials or news area. If you would like I can send the code for this layout.

I moved the form boxes down to get them out of the area and altered some colors in image 2

[Sadoun]

elgemcdlf

I like what you have done there and it looks neat. What I don't like is the LOGO position. Almost all commercial websites have their LOGO on the TOP/LEFT side of the screen. That is the natural position and where most site visitors expect it to be at.

What do you guys/gals think?

[elgemcdlf]

That may be where most all place it BUT the prime real estate on a document is top right. It is the first place the human eye sees when one enters a site. It is a very brief time frame. It is your site though and swapping sides is really no big deal. Whoever is doing your images I would have alter the blue and red in the phone number image to match the blue and red of the logo.

You have a nice site, IMHO it only needs cleaned up and organized a bit. Perhaps while altering the logo create a small animation out of it with the rings coming from the sat dish somewhat as the Fortec receivers do when scanning.

Wish I could get a decent image to upload

[Sadoun]

Ok, a subtle change was done to the home page. www.sadoun.com do you see the changes? What do you think? Should the changes be implmented sitewide?

[elgemcdlf]

I have an exercise for you Open one of the head images and look at it. Just for a brief time. Do not analyze layout. Now ask your self what do you remember about the image you saw. If it is your logo I would say leave the logo on the top right

[elgemcdlf]

I like much more. Not wanting to sound like everything is all wrong here The color for the blue in the logo is 000099, the red is c00000. use those colors for the text under the phone number link and add a <br> at the end of the link. This will create visually an upsidedown triangle causing the eye to move downward into the page.

Next on my list is to utilize these colors again for the text in the center top of the main body. Leave the Welcome ... centered but the text below it use a left align. You want the entire body of text there centered in it's opening and utilize <br> to control length. You want it to be slightly longer than the Welcome... header. Starting just to the left and passing roughly the same amount to the right.

Now to the menu bar added. It suffers from the same problem the old head had. Not enough space allocated for each area along with inconsistancy in CAP usage. CAP the first letter of each link. Use the blue from the logo for the lines and links. Hard code a width for each area that houses a link. Center the link in the area allocated. Use 95 as a width for Contact Us, 75 for View Cart, 115 for Order Status, I used 50 for the now missing Info, 45 for Help and left the remainder unallocated (the table will fill it to fit the table which should be set to 100%) which housed Email this ... It gave the appearance that everything was evenly spaced.

You have added Products so you will have to play with sizing but that should get you started. Now to fonts, decide on one and use it Arial here Verdana there, Lucinda over there ...

The right menu area looks a bit cramped. Maybe try robbing 5 pixels from each of the 4 areas in the main body and expanding the right by 20 pixels. The left menu looks tons better!

Now we shall give insight into the future. This thin line shall carry forward into the menu areas of the main body Next on the list is a clean up of the footer area

You know you should have never asked. Remove the "packages" after every link in the first section of the left menu. The main heading has the word packages in it. This only makes it redundant. Directly to the right of this menu area where they are designated as packages you have them listed as bundles. I think one or the other or perhaps referring to them as systems.

I am done for now. I promise!

[elgemcdlf]

This is how I envision the site. This is only for visual concept. Would have mouseover submenus for each main area. If you create a dir named sadoun1_files and place the images in it as a subdir of the dir with index.html in it all should view good for you. With the 5 file limit I will post remainder in next message.

[elgemcdlf]

The html file is to large to upload as a txt file (24K). I broke it into 2 files. index1.txt paste into a text editor first and index2.txt paste in below it. Save as index.html. Then open in browser to view.

Thought you might find this of interest also. http://www.web-source.net/website_sins.htm