Trying to come up with something new...

Hey guys,

Im kinda new here, so hey everyone!

Anyway, I am looking to come up with a better design for my company's website. I designed the the middle to end of last year and I believe it is due for at least a bit of a shakeup in the design area. My company is Financial Technologies. We do debt consolidation for troubled businesses. I am the webmaster and main IT Manager here.

The link is: http://www.financialtechnologies.com

Could you please give me a bit of feedback on what is good, bad, and if you have anything that strikes you as needing to be changed now? It would be extremely helpful!

Thanks guys

-- Michael

Webmaster and IT Manager: Financial Technologies (http://www.financialtechnologies.com)
President: True Connections (A web design and computer systems maintenance firm in Houston, Tx (Website coming soon!) )

Straight off - I'd change the fonts - serifed fonts are designed for printing. Use something like Tahoma or Verdana. Sencond - your headings use images - they should be HTML headings so that both users with images turned off and search engines know what the page is about.

I do like your clear navigation, but again, that should be done using HTML & CSS.

Coupla questions:

First off, I am sure there is a way to detect with Javascript whether someone has images turned on or not, however, will that work for the search engine coming to my site?

Second, I do have text links at the bottom of the page, is that not enough? I really like my rollovers

Finally, I think I will try to change my font...should just be able to stick a css in there to fix it. Thanks for the tips...keep em coming guys if you can. Thanks

-- Michael

Webmaster and IT Manager: Financial Technologies (http://www.financialtechnologies.com)
President: True Connections (A web design and computer systems maintenance firm in Houston, Tx (Website coming soon!) )

Yes, you CAN do this, but why bother creating two sets of content - i.e. double your work load. Do it right the first time and save yourself a headache. Also, Google frowns upon those that load up different content depending on the user - they will ban you if you get caught.

re: Links @ the bottom: Yes - I believe this is enough, but I have also heard that Google will only index the first X amount of links - I've always played it safe and had all my important stuff @ the top.

re: Fonts - yup - just whack in your font family attribute in the body style of the css file.

gotcha...well dont want to be banned from Google heh

I will see what I can do about that for the next redesign of the site. At the moment, the managment likes the drop shadowed company name, so gunna stick with it for now. Will work on the font idea, however, and may change the top text to be text instead of pictures. Maybe meet the idea halfway.

You can still use images for your titles, combined with CSS. Check out this method

Font changed...take a look?

Thank God for CSS! Back in the day...that would have been a lot of <font> tags to change lol

Will check out the link you gave later.

-- Michael Anderson

Webmaster and IT Manager: Financial Technologies (http://www.financialtechnologies.com)
President: True Connections (A web design and computer systems maintenance firm in Houston, Tx (Website coming soon!) )

Ack - The homepage is all BOLD! Other than that, looking good. On help.htm, you have a dl/dt, but you've used &nbsp; for padding - use CSS to do padding. Check out these great tutorials on lists:
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listutorial/
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic2/