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RyanSmith
09-25-2012, 06:56 PM
Take a gander at our agency site, which recently went through a major revision:
adhouseadvertising.com

If anybody would be so kind as to google the name as well (ad house advertising) I'd be grateful if you would tell me if we appear yet organically. We recently got large enough we split into our own division.

We had started as a television production company... the agency side got large enough there was reason to divide.

If you would be so kind as to provide feedback, I'm actually migrating the production company's old site to look similar to the agency site.

Edit House Productions
OLD: edithouse.net
NEW: edithouse.co (temporary .co for me to develop on)

vangogh
09-26-2012, 01:01 AM
First I did search in Google and you showed up #1 through #20. It is your company name so it's probably to be expected.

My first thought with the site is to wonder if the image on the home page is too large. It grabs your attention to the point where I don't see anything else right away. I'm also not sure what the images are trying to communicate about your business. They're nice images, but after seeing them I could just as easily be on the site of a nature photographer. I assume the idea is to show off New Mexico, but I think, especially on the home page, you should be bringing the attention to the business. You are trying to get across a message over each image, but the image is so attention getting I miss the message.

A technical note: Your drop down menus are showing too low for me in Firefox and Safari (both on a Mac). If I don't move to the sub menus quick enough, they disappear before I can click any of the links. Another weird technical issue I'm seeing is I'm able to scroll the page horizontally a little. I can push the page to the left about 170px leaving that much blank white space on the right. I never see a scroll bar though.

I like the On Air, On Line, On Target at the bottom of the home page.

Everything seems laid out well. It's easy to find things on the site. It looks like all the information is built on a grid. 12 columns if I'm not mistaken. In fact I see a grid framework underlying things in the source code.

I'm not sure the way you have the blog set up is going to be effective. It's all about you and if you want me to read it, it needs to be more about me. You've set up 4 different blogs, but they all seem to be news for your business. Why not offer people marketing tips and design tips, etc.? Sprinkle in the news, but I wouldn't make it all about company news. I don't see people wanting to read or subscribe to that.

Also with the blog, the length of each line of text is very long, especially with the small font size. It's a struggle to read. Bigger font or smaller line length or both. The font size across the site is pretty small too.

Overall it's a nice site. Like I said it's easy to find information, which is a major thing. I do think the images on the home page distract from the main message. Maybe just have them smaller or keep it as a single image.

I'll let someone come in behind me to talk more about the content itself.

Wozcreative
09-26-2012, 08:19 PM
Looks nice, clean, very legible, professional.

Some things that need to be improved:
• The social media sharing on every-single-page. It's not necessary. Put them on pages that people will want to share, it doesn't look good if all your pages show 0's. Best place to do it is under a news blog.
• You have quite a bit of run-on sentences and should edit for grammar. You seem to pack in 3 ideas into one sentence as apposed to simplifying it. You're favourite words are "and also" and "as well as". I noticed because those are words I use quite often, but I've been taught to limit repeating myself, use it once and no more.
• Not a fan of the sombrero with the tassels in the logo, it would do better without it.

I did like the site overall though, it's visually appealing and welcoming.

vangogh
09-27-2012, 11:52 PM
The social media sharing on every-single-page. It's not necessary.

I was thinking the same thing. It looked like they were just coded into the footer so I didn't mention it, but I agree they don't need to be everywhere. Best is on content that people are likely to share.

HireLogoDesign
10-14-2012, 08:49 PM
Yeah the images are way to big...and overwhelming...it does look nice,professional and clean though outside of that..One issue that you'll have to address is cross browser...If you look at your page on other browsers it doesn't perform as intended..here is a screen shot of what I was seeing on ie 9 and it gets worse on ie7 i believe. 268

HireLogoDesign
10-14-2012, 08:50 PM
And here is another view from a different ie version..I didn't check other browsers. 269

ozetel
10-14-2012, 09:05 PM
Hi

Just some quick notes;
- yes I third the motion that the image is a bit too large,
- consider the design for tablet/Ipad/Phone viewing also,
- the main menu descriptions could be shortened I think
- maybe highlight one video that can be watched and then have a carousel that has the rest rather then placing them all on the page - like on the broadcast commercial production page (might look nice)

but it is really an informative site that looks official and engaging. Hope it helps

nealrm
10-14-2012, 10:26 PM
In general I liked the site. I would make the opening image shorter, I think it is too tall. Because of the images height, it pushed much of what you do below the fold. So at first glance I didn't get an impression of what your firm did.

Don't worry about IE7, it's market share is below 4% and dropping quickly. I checked it in Chrome, Firefox, IE8, IE9 and Safari; all looked good.

Googling a site URL is worthless. It will always show as number 1. If you will share some keywords, we can let you know how those rate. Google webmaster tools will also help.

RyanSmith
12-09-2012, 04:13 PM
Thank you all very much for your thoughts. I'll be making some tweaks based on your suggestions soon.

Regarding the multiple blogs, hah, that is the intention. We shall be maintaining a current blog, as well as agency-related news in our fields, as well as best practices and suggestions.
I'll tone town the image soon so less page content is below the fold.

I'll look into IE issues. As a software developer IE has always been my least favorite platform, riddled with issues. But still, for the largest user experience possible it's worth taking a look at.

vangogh
12-14-2012, 10:50 AM
Regarding the multiple blogs, hah, that is the intention.

Looking at it again it seems your multiple blogs are really different categories of a single blog. You might want to change the label in the navigation to reflect that. Right now it looks like there are 4 separate blogs, most of which without content. It would make more sense to call the main menu link "Blog" and make it clearer the other links are to categories in the same blog.

You should also provide an easy mechanism to let people subscribe. Where is the rss icon that links to your feed? Or a button or link saying subscribe.

My comment above still stands too about the content itself. Unless you're a well known brand people aren't likely to be interested in news about your company. You want to offer something more than news about yourself if you want people to read. It's ok to have a company news category, but you really need to offer something else to get people reading and coming back.

Alex1
02-18-2013, 04:09 PM
I like it. It has a very professional feel, information is relatively easy to get to and it's quite pleasant on the eye. Some parts could be more refined, as in some places
images stick out too much from the color of the site, but its not of a big issue.