Feedback on a banner design
-
I was hoping to get some feedback from you guys regarding some banner redesign we are working on for our website. We are currently using the blue one, but we werent happy with the logo we had of the hat and hands shaking. So once we started working on a new logo, that logo doesnt match at all with the current design so we were messing around with the banner and came up with these ideas.
Id appreciate some feedback good or bad
edit: sorry guess [img] doesnt work in here
Current Banner
http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/banner_zpse92b853f.jpg
New 1
http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/21-03-banner_zpsfc224501.jpg
New 2
http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/19-03-banner_zps17c3f2f1.jpg
New 3
http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/20-03-banner_zps966bb780.jpg
-
I apologize for not seeing this somehow it passed right over me.
The large advantages for using a managed WordPress host our primarily speed, security in the form of powerful firewalls and if they get through that which they do very rarely do every one of them uses http://sucuri.net/ this allows them to know if there's any malware on your site and have it cleaned and running perfectly at no cost to you. You get hosting that is built around just WordPress an incredible abundance of WordPress knowledge at your fingertips and the idea of you have enough toward about without having to spend what would amount to a real lot of money in order to get a WordPress site to load in under one or two seconds consistently both nationally and internationally. I highly encourage you to read not just the pages I've sent you, but everything on the sites that are about the host.http://wpengine.com/fast-page-loads/
https://www.zippykid.com/benefits/speed-fast-wordpress-host/
https://www.zippykid.com/benefits/
http://websynthesis.com/features/
https://page.ly/features/For instance I'm currently writing a Moz blog post on the subject so I can't give out too much information or I'd be self plagiarizing I know it's unfortunate. I best advice is go to their websites I think everyone of them has a done a wonderful job of informing people of their benefits. I also should tell you that I have an account with every company am about to mention. You cannot go wrong with any of them. Pay attention to the band with and page views you are allotted and know that some of them are maybe a better value than others. Regardless you can rest assured that all of them will do a great job.
My other piece of advice is contact them and ask them why they're the one you should pick. Take a lot into account as to how much time they take to get back to you I will mention this is public knowledge automatic has invested in both WP engine and Zippykid. However web synthesis is still an excellent choice as is Page.ly
All of them run on top-quality hardware and are built only to host WordPress because WordPress has a database unlike a pure HTML website the time it takes to access the database with caching on the server where somebody has spent a great deal of money to have that website cache so in the event of a person going to another page you have removed what made WordPress slower in the 1st place many of them have content delivery networks built-in the ones that have CDN's built-in also have a lot more going on on the server side meaning you have a faster host the more solid website.all of them use Nginx instead of Apache you can run a website with 10,000 visitors on Nginx with merely 2 MB of RAM Apache uses far more than that for 5 people.
I hope you can do some more research I recommend using this as a research tool as well because I cannot use my own content look at the hosting section on my website there's an FAQ at the top as well just click the FAQ you may also private message me of course if you have any particular questions that I cannot answer here I'm sorry for that.
http://www.blueprintmarketing.com/hosting/ -
I agree with Thomas on the hosting. I haven't personally used Zippy Kid, Pagely, or Presslabs, but I do use WPEngine and Synthesis. I am in the process of migrating 2 more sites over to Synthesis this week.
There are lots of great benefits to host your wordpress on these servers. They are built very specifically for Wordpress and have gotten rid of the bloat of a traditional server. Your sites will load faster, even without a CDN. They keep everything backed up and secure too. Peace of mind is what I always look for in a web host and that is what you get when you host with a team that loves wordpress and only do wordpress.
There is not enough room to cover all the benefits and details. Just look them up and be sure to read the FAQs on each.
-
Thomas thanks again for the information. I took a look at those sites and it looks like webdevstudios does build nice wordpress sites.
Why do you recommend those hosts rather than anyold host? I dont get the reason. We currently use godaddy and are satisfied with their service. Is there some benefit of using a WP host that I am not aware of?
-
well I can give you some very professional companies to hire.
Is an amazing studio they do a lot of incredible work and they start
Reasonable price
A another way is to use 99 designs and build it on a quality framework like Genesis
have looked at WP engines developers link and you will see some very good developers list.
I noticed you are running WordPress with Apache as a server you might want to look into
WP engine, Zippy kid, web synthesis, Pagely & Presslabs they are all dedicated to WordPress and will make an excellent host for your website.
The way I would do it is make the site from Photoshop and have a developer build it.
Either that or find a theme that you like and have it constructed on a high quality framework if you're using WordPress if you're not you can still have it turned into HTML or most other platforms.
However if you want guaranteed quality Webdevstudios did LEXISNEXIS.com & happy cog does Fortune 100 websites mostly. I didn't want to give you the name of the studio that I thought would let you down so I gave you once I know will do well. Web dev studios is much more reasonable, and I would encourage you to give them a try. I currently have a time set up to meet with them and plan on having my site rebuilt by them.
I would also grab the .co of your domain and believe if you could help your rankings.
I hope I have been of help,
Thomas
-
Thanks Thomas and please, we welcome real feedback and that means negative as well The funny part is the guy who designed this for us is a regular on 99designs, but yeah it may be better to see lots of options rather than a few.
Maybe its time for me to think more about a complete redesign (we just built our current page one month ago for $1,250). We aren't really happy with the way it came out we want a more professional feel. Its difficult figuring out who to hire for something like this. Guess thats going a bit off topic for now.
-
Thanks for the feedback Tim. We would love to try to split test though we don't currently have a webmaster that can help us with that and our budget is pretty low (new company, only a couple months old).
-
PS. You might get a lot of more free advice if you go on Twitter and then put #WebDesign then simply ask people for their opinion..
-
I too am not a web designer and if I want to get the same disclaimer
However
I don't understand why you guys are trying to force the social media into the web banner I think that makes it look a lot worse. If anything the social media should be customized to blend with the banner if you're going to put it into the banner or it should be a different part of the site as it is in right below or above.
I would go to use only number three honestly I wouldn't use any of the other ones in my humble opinion.
I agree with the other gentleman I don't like the other ones 12 are really not very well put together in my opinion compared to number three. However I think you should plan the social media world lose it on the banner and just an idea and this is not criticism at all as I think you did a great job with everything maybe you should have a professional have a crack at it it's very inexpensive services below and this is just if you want to go that way not that your work is bad at all.
If you want to know a very inexpensive way to get all these things blended and have multiple different designers take a crack at it 99designs.com and designcrowd.com Will allow you to have professionals make a new banner for you for approximately anywhere from hundred dollars and up. You get more than 30 designs to look at and you don't have to pay if you don't like it.
Please don't think of that I think any of the designs are bad in any way shape or form. However if you want something that looks extremely professional this is my best advice. So it blend and social media. I hope I've been of help to you
sincerely,
Thomas
Second disclaimer. I have dictated all of this on mobile phone so if there's any spelling or glaring grammar errors or words that don't belong where they do please excuse them.
-
Disclaimer: I am not a graphic artist/ designer.
New 1 and 2 seem unremarkable and kind of disappear on the page. New 3 stands out a bit more. I guess I am not clear on what your new logo is. In # 1&2, it seems to be the USA map with arrows and SDR. On 3, there isn't one, unless the grad cap icon is it. #1 actually has both the map and the grad cap.
On 1& 2 you use a sans-serif font on the SDR, but a serif font on the words spelled out. Was that intentional? Nothing wrong with using 2 different fonts in a logo, but going from sans-serif to serif when switching from the initials to the full words seems a bit strange. I personally prefer sans-serif fonts online, but I get the connection between serif and academia for a student targeted ad.
Have you tried swapping the logo with the words spelled out in options #1 and #2. Put the words spelled out on the left and the logo in the center? Even if this looked better, I will still try to get some attention-getting color in there like you did in your current one and #3.
The best way to decide is to run a split test and see what behaviors occur with each one. My guess is that #3 would outperform #1 and 2 simply because it stands out more. This is a perfect thing to split test and keep tweaking until you get the best results.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Requirements for mobile menu design have created a duplicated menu in the text/cache view.
Hi, Upon checking the text cache view of our home page, I noticed the main menu has been duplicated. Please see: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.trinitypower.com&strip=1 Our coder tells me he created one version for the desktop and one for the mobile version. Duplicating the menu cannot be good for on page SEO. With that said, I have had no warnings reported back from Moz. Maybe the moz bots are not tuned to looks for such a duplication error. Anyway, the reason the coder created a different menu for mobile in order to support the design requirements. I did not like the look and feel of the responsive version created based on the desktop version. Hi solution to this problem is to convert the Mobile version menu into ajax. what do you guys think? Thanks, Jarrett
Web Design | | TrinityPower0 -
How to bounce back after a new url & new site design?
About a month ago, my company changed domains (from the long-established www.imageworksstudio.com to the new www.imageworkscreative.com) and also did a complete overhaul of our site. We tried to do everything necessary to keep Google happy as we went through this change, but we've suffered a drastic loss of both rankings and traffic. I know that can happen as a result of a redesign AND as a result of a new domain, but I'm wondering how long you would expect it to take before we bounced back and also, what can we do in the meantime to improve?
Web Design | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Can anyone recommend me a good wordpress website designer for local services website?
Hi all,
Web Design | | chanel27
Does anyone know of any good wordpress SEO designer? I am looking to build some sites on:
Aircon Services
Laundry Services
Carpet Cleaning etc The wordpress must be able to easily add articles from time to time like this HTML site:
http://www.airconservices.com.sg/articles.html Appreciate you help!0 -
SEO while designing the website and continuous SEO
What's the difference between SEO while designing/developing a website (ie, setting up a website so it is crawled by search engines) and the SEO that people talk about that needs to be viewed analyzed and changed all the time? I don't have a ton of money to spend on SEO right now but I do want to make sure my website is set up by an SEO expert (if possible) so when I do have money to spend on SEOthe website is set up properly to work with more advanced forms of SEO. I guess I don't understand where you can draw the line (if forced due to money constraints) between SEO in the beginning and continued SEO. What do I need to look for with SEO and the design of my website. How do I get some type of SEO without breaking the bank??
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
Panda and Penquin Fall - Could HTML Design an Issue?
Hi, We were hit hard by Panda 3.4 on March 23rd 2012. Then Penguin came along and slapped us down a little farther on April 24th. White hat SEO for 13 years on the site. I have been trying to discover the reason we got hit so hard, to date 90% down. We ae wiped. I have a couple of keywords still #2 and #3 and we see up and down changes in Google webmaster tools, i.e. a keyword is supposedly up 50 points then another down 50. All other 150 keywords that we used to rank on the first page for are not even showing up. I have a person that is about to do a full link analysis but since we never went after links I just never had the feeling that is where our problem is at, but definitely going to explore it. The reason for my post is that last night I spoke with an SEO person that has some pretty good credentials (9 years experience and works currently at large online marketing company with seo with clients like Honda) and he was nice enough to just take a quick look at the site. He said he saw nothing really wrong and did not think that we were hit for any of the normal issues people are listing, i.e. duplicate content, backlinks. His first impression was that we were knocked down because the site is "hard to index". He said the site still uses tables and a lot of our Doc Statements were for HTML 4.01 from 1999. As we all know, there are 'many' experts in this industry. So I wanted a little feedback from the community. Our main site was built in Dreamweaver using tables. We do have a Wordpress blog that is very small and just now posting to add fresh content. (posts seem to rank pretty good, this is why I thought, you know he may be right) Would an older site be penalized like this for using tables? What would you do at this stage if you had a site that is not recovering? I have now reached panic mode and have to do something, just not sure of the next step. I will be happy to post the URL if anyone wants to help with advice. Thanks,
Web Design | | Force7
Force70 -
Over Optimization & Footer Links for Crediting Web Design to a Company
With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | JoshGill270 -
Looking for quality, cheap web design company recommendations
Does anyone have any recommendations of a very cheap web design company from India or other countries where the work is also high quality? I can project manage the development and provide a set of web standards such as to use valid code, no meta keyword tags, no flash, etc etc. I am looking for companies I can trust to perform the actual work. The web is full of companies but examples of quality work with WordPress, Joomla and particular ecommerce platforms is very thin or non-existent. If you can share any companies which you have personal experience with, I would appreciate it.
Web Design | | RyanKent0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0