Site Critique

mneylon

We've just put a completely revamped version of our site online.
Your feedback would be much appreciated:
http://www.blacknight.ie/

Michele

Hagar

As soon as I saw the knight on the blackknight site was white I left.
A bit harsh I know, but its so obviously wrong.

FreeHost

Nice work Michelle, very clean, I see you went for a CMS.

mneylon

FreeHost wrote:

Nice work Michelle, very clean, I see you went for a CMS.

Thank Damien
Yup - it's running on Typo3 which makes management of it about 20 times easier !

Seth Brundle

I like it (except the white knight!).
I noticed that when I move my mouse over the 'colocation' dhtml menu and it pops out and then move over the 'about us' menu, it is covered by the colocation's one for a second or two.
I kind of like the images at the bottom (asp.net, tomcat, mysql, etc.) in colour but maybe thats because Im a bit sad!
4 XHTML validation errors!

mneylon

kbannon wrote:

I like it (except the white knight!).
I noticed that when I move my mouse over the 'colocation' dhtml menu and it pops out and then move over the 'about us' menu, it is covered by the colocation's one for a second or two.
I kind of like the images at the bottom (asp.net, tomcat, mysql, etc.) in colour but maybe thats because Im a bit sad!
4 XHTML validation errors!

I'll have to have a look at the XHTML problems on the main page.. they weren't there earlier

The menus - we know about that. It only happens on the main page

buddy

Very nice. I found typo 3 very daunting

I can see the point of the others of having a White Knight on a site called Blacknight!!

mneylon

The company name is Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd, but we never had a black logo.

Seth Brundle

I know, but it is automatically assumed when you see the reference to black and also the picture of the knight

Zaltais

blacknight wrote:

I'll have to have a look at the XHTML problems on the main page.. they weren't there earlier

The menus - we know about that. It only happens on the main page

XHTML problems are gone now, but your CSS doesn't validate - about a dozen errors. Nothing major though....

One thing that bugs me is that the menu 'moves' when you hit the second level pages - it goes from left to centre aligned on the page... also the gray backround under 'about us' and 'support' disappears. Coupled with the dramatic image layout change, I actually felt like I'd left the site and gone to a different one.

mneylon

kbannon wrote:

I know, but it is automatically assumed when you see the reference to black and also the picture of the knight

The favicon is black

mneylon

Zaltais wrote:

XHTML problems are gone now, but your CSS doesn't validate - about a dozen errors. Nothing major though....

That will have to be fixed!
Thanks for the heads up

dangerman

Nice work.

Personally i've never been a fan of using random stock images - ala girl with laptop on top of rock...i just don't like them. But they do work well on the page.

if i try really really really hard i can find one or two tiny tiny niggles -the antialiasing on the menu bar nav top should be removed/sharpened up - the text doesn't look as sharp as the menu item text.

also, on the index page if i roll over the orange group of drop downs, if i move across as a new one appears the old one dissapears, however, that doesn't quite happen if i move into the grey ones - about us/contact us.

i know, i'm stretching into the anal detail

Thumbs up.

impr0v

I know this is getting repetitive but you reallly should listen to those saying that the knight should be black. It creates a visual/verbal oxymoron which you might think is somewhat trivial, but it associates that sense of confusion with the brand identity to a certain degree.

joePC

Site look good, just a couple of things I would change,

1. The + & - signs in the main image, take them out.
2. All the links that are in the txt on the home page, just make them underlined & not bold & blue.
3. I would put the "Basic, Pro, Standard etc" on top instead of the side.

Change to black night.

Thanks JoePC

dangerman

On the CMS Blacknight ... typo3 - what's it like to implement and would you be comfortable leaving a client with it to update their site?

mneylon

dangerman wrote:

On the CMS Blacknight ... typo3 - what's it like to implement and would you be comfortable leaving a client with it to update their site?

dangerman - we left the implementation up to the pros, so I can't give you an honest answer on that just yet (I'm going to give it a try on one of my own pet projects to see how it works out)
As for maintenace....
Once you get your head around the basics it's very easy to use.
Typo3 offers you the ability to "lock" editing on certain pages to certain users etc., so you could allow your client to update some areas of their site without allowing them total freedom to break things

Fergal C

Nice site overall.

Not really sure about the relevance of the mani images on the home page. I feel it makes your site look American, maybe that is what you want.

I'd also consider ways of making the site more buyer friendly. For eg I would include "Buy Now" buttons under the plan specs as well as above them. I'd also include "Buy Now" buttons on the comparison charts.

A bit more info on your CP features might be useful (maybe I'm missing it), eg does it include Fantastico?

Some of your paragraphs just have one word on the second line (800 x 600), perhaps a little indentation or bulleting would improve overall appearance of the text.

Good luck with it.

BTW what is Blacknight's relationship with 2bscene?

jArgHA

Yer man sitting on top of the rock looks like 'The Rock' (Scorpion Kings & Walking Tall).

Back to topic, site looks nice, again I would have the same view on the colour of the Blacknight logo, its a little confusing to the mind/eye.

richardo

So everyone agrees - the logo is the wrong colour.

They refuse to change it.

I would suggest they change their company name to Whitenight Solutions.

That would solve everything

joePC

Would you be willing to share how much you guys paid for the site blacknight?

Thanks JoePC

mneylon

joePC wrote:

Would you be willing to share how much you guys paid for the site blacknight?

No we wouldn't
Let's just say that we got value for money.
We put together a reasonably comprehensive brief which we sent out to about a dozen or so companies throughout Ireland.
We had asked for certain elements to be included and for certain things to be done eg. that it would work cross-browser and cross-platform and that the CMS backend would be compatible with Firefox.
A couple of companies were able to address all of our needs, while others came back with almost embarassing quotes. We finally opted for 2bscene because we felt that they were able to give us a turnkey solution.

mneylon

Fergal

Thanks for the feedback.

Fantastico is specific to Cpanel, but we have Installatron which is a much better set of scripts which works beautifully with Direct Admin

Henri wrote:

BTW what is Blacknight's relationship with 2bscene?

They did the site for us and use us for their hosting. We also outsource SEO for our clients to them.

aidan_walsh

Looks pretty good. Only thing I don't like is the fact that the prices are exclusive of VAT, but I don't suppose thats a site design problem Very nice.

mneylon

doodle_sketch wrote:

Looks pretty good. Only thing I don't like is the fact that the prices are exclusive of VAT, but I don't suppose thats a site design problem Very nice.

We say they're ex-VAT on the bottom of every page

aidan_walsh

Oh, I know that, but I'd prefer if they were inc. VAT... Seems less sneaky that way. You don't go for the weekly shop and have 21% added on at the till do you? But maybe thats just me...

evilhomer

blacknight wrote:

A couple of companies were able to address all of our needs, while others came back with almost embarassing quotes.

What was the highest price you got qouted?
you don't have to say who by, just the figure. for the laugh :P

mneylon

I *think* the highest was in the region of 16k while the lowest was just over 1k

buddy

General query.

Your title has "irish web hosting....." etc in it, all in lower case. Doesn't look neat sitting in the task bar but is this search engine friendly?

e.g. Better than "Irish web hosting...."