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Show HN: Criticize our website

11 points by Qawba 12y ago

anonfunction 12y ago
I think things could be sized down a bit. Especially places like http://www.qawba.com/#market http://www.qawba.com/#market where it doesn't fit on my 15" retina mbp. I like the full page effect of the home screen and the text that follows. Maybe have an image in the whitespace like on the contact page? Speaking of, the contact page seems weird to me kind of like it doesn't follow a grid and the typographs looks off to me. The links at the end should be actual links and not just the circles that are clickable. License is spelled wrong in the footer. Cheers.
- Qawba 12y ago
  Thank you so much for the review and suggestions, and thanks for your time.
- DanBC 12y ago
  > License is spelled wrong in the footer. That's a valid British spelling. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/licence http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/licence
  - Qawba 12y ago
    License for American English and Licence for British English.
    - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
      That one slipped me by, strangely you get a TV licence from "TV licensing" but a fence comes from a fencing contractor. English, it's weird.
jcr 12y ago
You need to invest more time and effort learning the English language, and be extremely careful when proofreading your written text. There are a ton of English mistakes on your page; some are simple typing and/or proofreading mistakes like forgetting a space, but others are far more severe grammatical and/or usage mistakes. By using the English language for your website, you are targeting English speaking customers. If a potential customer knows English and notices your mistakes, then you're giving them good reason to not trust you to build their website. Examples: > identity.Through You forgot the space after the period. > our experts are complemented to the latest technology. This makes no sense. > We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies. You need a noun after "highly qualified" such as "highly qualified engineers" or "highly qualified professionals". The prepositional phrase "with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies" makes no sense. There are more examples, but I don't want to be overly critical. English is a difficult language to learn, even for people who grow up in English speaking countries. Hiring a native English speaker to do proofreading for you should really help improve the quality of your text while also helping you to learn the language better.
- V-2 12y ago
  http://www.qawba.com/market/fakia-simple-and-modern-responsive-landing-page/ http://www.qawba.com/market/fakia-simple-and-modern-responsi... "012. PEOPEL THINK SECTION" "Backstrech - https://github.com/srobbin/jquery-backstretch" https://github.com/srobbin/jquery-backstretch" BACKSTRECH?? One would expect a better level of attention to detail from professional designers. This is disqualifying. BTW I'm not even a native speaker, but these typos simply jump out at you.
- rmsaksida 12y ago
  Another nitpick: copyright notice is outdated. "Copyright © 2012 ... All Rights Reserved."
georgespencer 12y ago
I like it but for a company offering branding advice you don't seem to have a discernible brand. I also always think 'agency' websites without bios and staff photos are basically run by a few 13 year olds. Not a bad thing, but this feeling is compounded by lack of postal address or telephone number. If you have an office, put it on there. Nobody will call or visit, it just makes people feel safer.
- Qawba 12y ago
  Thank you for your feedback and thanks for your time too . i don't know where did you read the word "Agency"!
  - boomlinde 12y ago
    Your business is an agency by definition.
bsitum 12y ago
LoL Anyone know where to learn English by playing games. My English so horrifying please help me
stax012 12y ago
Following what @georgespencer said, there's no strong brand here. Forget about the website and come up with a brand. By the way, marketing yourselves to people that will pay you handsomely for professional services and then putting an ad for a $4.99 template at the bottom is a dumb idea.
peterhi 12y ago
The site is very dark and bland which sits badly with "We design unique and original brand identity", which is itself clumsy English. The site design is not original and others have done it better. If brand identity is important then perhaps you should put some effort into it. Far too much whitespace and don't be afraid to use colours.
tokenizerrr 12y ago
While the page loaded it showed me a bunch of text. Then once it loaded it just showed me some large dark image of people behind computers with the text "Web solutions and Design" overlaid on it, forcing me to scroll in order to find out anything at all about your site. I realize this is a design trend lately, but the loading threw me off and I personally think it wastes a ton of screen real estate. There's also http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png
nerdy 12y ago
- The way the page loads makes it feel like a modal (text for "Brand Identity" and "Who we are" is shown, then are pushed down once the imagery loads). - Information density is low... results in a lot of scrolling for small amounts of information. Initial page load "above the fold" offers very little. - Lose the mystery meat navigation for "Web design and UI" and "Web Development" (in the "Brand Identity" section) in favor of text labels, or simply blend that content into the rest of the page. - While lots of padding/margin is a trend, everything feels so incredibly far apart that it's completely disconnected; maybe a symptom of my 1920x1080 resolution. It's impossible to find something specific (for example, social media links). - You made me load ASCII art when the page loaded! It should be removed, however small the additional data transfer might seem. Also remove the other commented HTML such as the ids bannerVideo and our-work. - It feels like "Who we are" is important and should go first, or alongside "Brand Identity". - Enable compression!
- Qawba 12y ago
  Just Thank you.
jarnix 12y ago
It's empty, dark/suicidal, weakly branded, already seen, too big, too much empty space, not enough colors, not enough information, portfolio/projects ?, not human, etc.
jarnix 12y ago
And I forget, "fakia" too ! :)
boomlinde 12y ago
There is no trailing space after the punctuation of the first sentence on the page.
timinman 12y ago
'Live Preview' from the Fakia page produces a Host Gator 500 error.
dkbrk 12y ago
Mousing over the buttons to switch between brand identity/web design and UI/web development shows a text selection cursor.
oliwarner 12y ago
Contact page: There's a limit to how much whitespace is desirable and I'd say it's probably somewhat less than the 400px between H1 and content and again between content and footer, on the contact page. The page is 3 viewport-heights when it should only be one. It feels spaced out for the very sake of being spaced out. Contact: Have you seen this when the page isn't super-wide? It's as above but twice as high. 800px between form and submit button. AWFUL. Home, second pane: Dump the mystery meat navigation. It's cute that you found a few font-awesome glyphs that you liked but they mean nothing to visitors. Navigation shouldn't be pot luck. There's also no call to action. If I land on the home page, you need to tell me what I can do and what you'd like me to do. And it looks like a turd if you turn javascript off. Make sure you don't rely on Javascript to display information. It'll cost you business if your JS ever breaks. And yeah, the whole thing needs cleaning up. It looks like a dev build. In production you want to losslessly recompress your images (optipng, jpegoptim, etc), strip your HTML down (tidy), minify your JS and CSS and pre-gzip everything that's static.
fareesh 12y ago
You are changing the background image property when a user hovers over the logo. Browsers will not load the background image for any element which is not visible, or where a CSS rule is not active. As a result, the hover version of the logo is only downloaded the first time the user hovers over the logo. A good workaround for this is to create a file with the regular and hover versions of the logo in it, and use the background-position property on hover to show the hover version.
enlightenedfool 12y ago
This web page has about 5 sentences in total and I have to scroll 5 pages to see that. Sick of this design. It's everywhere these days. Just stupid.
mattxxx 12y ago
There's nothing good to say about this website. As of right now, it: - Spreads very little information across an enormous space - Has nothing aesthetically engaging This means that I feel like you'll make my brand also a sparse and unattractive idea.
me_bx 12y ago
* There is no information of who you are: legal entity or freelancing individuals? What are your names, registration numbers, * The background image is too dark, couldn't see what it is without having to adjust the angle of my laptop screen * The "carousel" is a bad practice in general, and in your site many visitors won't even notice there is one, as it doesn't look like one. * SEO: There's no meta description, openGraph, twitter cards tags (like in many other websites. We're almost in 2015, what are people thinking about? * Copywriting: find a native English-speaker to fix things. * the License page has not enough content * good thing: the highly noticeable call to action "Start a project with us"
- ue_ 12y ago
  What's wrong with the English on the page? I have a hard time spotting mistakes.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    The language is a bit clunky. > Qawba is a group of developers, IT professionals, and graphic designers that works for the creation of websites, templates, the logo, posters and banners as well as the maintenance and updating of websites. The "that works for" here could probably be changed to soemthing better. > We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies. Has a missing word, and the "extensive profiles" feels a bit odd.
    - daledavies 12y ago
      I was thinking exactly this. Also the Brand Identity section feels a bit fragmented, and I felt "brand identity" is mentioned far too many times. Feels a bit like it was written for search engines. There is also a space missing after one of the full stops... > Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand Overall I feel maybe the tone of the website could be a bit more personal. It starts off feeling personal but then the "Who we are" section seems to mix perspectives, beginning in the third person. I'm no copywriter though, nor am I an expert in English although I am a native speaker. My own website probably isn't perfect either!
grayclhn 12y ago
The text is pretty hard to take seriously, e.g.: "Market Qawba: Premium themes to make your things elegant" Surely there's a more specific word than "things"
Qawba 12y ago
Thank you all for your feedbacks and criticism, I will take everything into consideration. Thanks for the motivation.
lafar6502 12y ago
your website is awful
soulkarver 12y ago
"Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand identity design we help you to distinguish your business from your competitors." --> You forgot the space after "identity." The site is very dark. You can hardly see the image in the background with all the black. Move the example products (like the 4.99 fakia landing page) closer to the top.
- Qawba 12y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion.
matrixnad 12y ago
You guys do a good job in presentation, however was not directly absorbed by how you would help me, or exactly what the your specialty is. Good design, not a clear enough picture on the company's mantra.

11 points by Qawba 12y ago

I think things could be sized down a bit. Especially places like http://www.qawba.com/#market http://www.qawba.com/#market where it doesn't fit on my 15" retina mbp. I like the full page effect of the home screen and the text that follows. Maybe have an image in the whitespace like on the contact page? Speaking of, the contact page seems weird to me kind of like it doesn't follow a grid and the typographs looks off to me. The links at the end should be actual links and not just the circles that are clickable. License is spelled wrong in the footer. Cheers.

Qawba 12y ago
Thank you so much for the review and suggestions, and thanks for your time.
DanBC 12y ago
> License is spelled wrong in the footer. That's a valid British spelling. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/licence http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/licence
- Qawba 12y ago
  License for American English and Licence for British English.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    That one slipped me by, strangely you get a TV licence from "TV licensing" but a fence comes from a fencing contractor. English, it's weird.

jcr 12y ago

You need to invest more time and effort learning the English language, and be extremely careful when proofreading your written text. There are a ton of English mistakes on your page; some are simple typing and/or proofreading mistakes like forgetting a space, but others are far more severe grammatical and/or usage mistakes. By using the English language for your website, you are targeting English speaking customers. If a potential customer knows English and notices your mistakes, then you're giving them good reason to not trust you to build their website. Examples: > identity.Through You forgot the space after the period. > our experts are complemented to the latest technology. This makes no sense. > We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies. You need a noun after "highly qualified" such as "highly qualified engineers" or "highly qualified professionals". The prepositional phrase "with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies" makes no sense. There are more examples, but I don't want to be overly critical. English is a difficult language to learn, even for people who grow up in English speaking countries. Hiring a native English speaker to do proofreading for you should really help improve the quality of your text while also helping you to learn the language better.

V-2 12y ago
http://www.qawba.com/market/fakia-simple-and-modern-responsive-landing-page/ http://www.qawba.com/market/fakia-simple-and-modern-responsi... "012. PEOPEL THINK SECTION" "Backstrech - https://github.com/srobbin/jquery-backstretch" https://github.com/srobbin/jquery-backstretch" BACKSTRECH?? One would expect a better level of attention to detail from professional designers. This is disqualifying. BTW I'm not even a native speaker, but these typos simply jump out at you.
rmsaksida 12y ago
Another nitpick: copyright notice is outdated. "Copyright © 2012 ... All Rights Reserved."

georgespencer 12y ago

I like it but for a company offering branding advice you don't seem to have a discernible brand. I also always think 'agency' websites without bios and staff photos are basically run by a few 13 year olds. Not a bad thing, but this feeling is compounded by lack of postal address or telephone number. If you have an office, put it on there. Nobody will call or visit, it just makes people feel safer.

Qawba 12y ago
Thank you for your feedback and thanks for your time too . i don't know where did you read the word "Agency"!
- boomlinde 12y ago
  Your business is an agency by definition.

bsitum 12y ago

LoL Anyone know where to learn English by playing games. My English so horrifying please help me

stax012 12y ago

Following what @georgespencer said, there's no strong brand here. Forget about the website and come up with a brand. By the way, marketing yourselves to people that will pay you handsomely for professional services and then putting an ad for a $4.99 template at the bottom is a dumb idea.

peterhi 12y ago

The site is very dark and bland which sits badly with "We design unique and original brand identity", which is itself clumsy English. The site design is not original and others have done it better. If brand identity is important then perhaps you should put some effort into it. Far too much whitespace and don't be afraid to use colours.

tokenizerrr 12y ago

While the page loaded it showed me a bunch of text. Then once it loaded it just showed me some large dark image of people behind computers with the text "Web solutions and Design" overlaid on it, forcing me to scroll in order to find out anything at all about your site. I realize this is a design trend lately, but the loading threw me off and I personally think it wastes a ton of screen real estate. There's also http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png http://i.imgur.com/4E6DVOe.png

nerdy 12y ago

- The way the page loads makes it feel like a modal (text for "Brand Identity" and "Who we are" is shown, then are pushed down once the imagery loads). - Information density is low... results in a lot of scrolling for small amounts of information. Initial page load "above the fold" offers very little. - Lose the mystery meat navigation for "Web design and UI" and "Web Development" (in the "Brand Identity" section) in favor of text labels, or simply blend that content into the rest of the page. - While lots of padding/margin is a trend, everything feels so incredibly far apart that it's completely disconnected; maybe a symptom of my 1920x1080 resolution. It's impossible to find something specific (for example, social media links). - You made me load ASCII art when the page loaded! It should be removed, however small the additional data transfer might seem. Also remove the other commented HTML such as the ids bannerVideo and our-work. - It feels like "Who we are" is important and should go first, or alongside "Brand Identity". - Enable compression!

Qawba 12y ago
Just Thank you.

jarnix 12y ago

It's empty, dark/suicidal, weakly branded, already seen, too big, too much empty space, not enough colors, not enough information, portfolio/projects ?, not human, etc.

jarnix 12y ago

And I forget, "fakia" too ! :)

boomlinde 12y ago

There is no trailing space after the punctuation of the first sentence on the page.

timinman 12y ago

'Live Preview' from the Fakia page produces a Host Gator 500 error.

dkbrk 12y ago

Mousing over the buttons to switch between brand identity/web design and UI/web development shows a text selection cursor.

oliwarner 12y ago

Contact page: There's a limit to how much whitespace is desirable and I'd say it's probably somewhat less than the 400px between H1 and content and again between content and footer, on the contact page. The page is 3 viewport-heights when it should only be one. It feels spaced out for the very sake of being spaced out. Contact: Have you seen this when the page isn't super-wide? It's as above but twice as high. 800px between form and submit button. AWFUL. Home, second pane: Dump the mystery meat navigation. It's cute that you found a few font-awesome glyphs that you liked but they mean nothing to visitors. Navigation shouldn't be pot luck. There's also no call to action. If I land on the home page, you need to tell me what I can do and what you'd like me to do. And it looks like a turd if you turn javascript off. Make sure you don't rely on Javascript to display information. It'll cost you business if your JS ever breaks. And yeah, the whole thing needs cleaning up. It looks like a dev build. In production you want to losslessly recompress your images (optipng, jpegoptim, etc), strip your HTML down (tidy), minify your JS and CSS and pre-gzip everything that's static.

fareesh 12y ago

You are changing the background image property when a user hovers over the logo. Browsers will not load the background image for any element which is not visible, or where a CSS rule is not active. As a result, the hover version of the logo is only downloaded the first time the user hovers over the logo. A good workaround for this is to create a file with the regular and hover versions of the logo in it, and use the background-position property on hover to show the hover version.

enlightenedfool 12y ago

This web page has about 5 sentences in total and I have to scroll 5 pages to see that. Sick of this design. It's everywhere these days. Just stupid.

mattxxx 12y ago

There's nothing good to say about this website. As of right now, it: - Spreads very little information across an enormous space - Has nothing aesthetically engaging This means that I feel like you'll make my brand also a sparse and unattractive idea.

me_bx 12y ago

* There is no information of who you are: legal entity or freelancing individuals? What are your names, registration numbers, * The background image is too dark, couldn't see what it is without having to adjust the angle of my laptop screen * The "carousel" is a bad practice in general, and in your site many visitors won't even notice there is one, as it doesn't look like one. * SEO: There's no meta description, openGraph, twitter cards tags (like in many other websites. We're almost in 2015, what are people thinking about? * Copywriting: find a native English-speaker to fix things. * the License page has not enough content * good thing: the highly noticeable call to action "Start a project with us"

ue_ 12y ago
What's wrong with the English on the page? I have a hard time spotting mistakes.
- DanBC 12y ago
  The language is a bit clunky. > Qawba is a group of developers, IT professionals, and graphic designers that works for the creation of websites, templates, the logo, posters and banners as well as the maintenance and updating of websites. The "that works for" here could probably be changed to soemthing better. > We are composed of highly qualified with extensive profiles acquired from national and international companies. Has a missing word, and the "extensive profiles" feels a bit odd.
  - daledavies 12y ago
    I was thinking exactly this. Also the Brand Identity section feels a bit fragmented, and I felt "brand identity" is mentioned far too many times. Feels a bit like it was written for search engines. There is also a space missing after one of the full stops... > Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand Overall I feel maybe the tone of the website could be a bit more personal. It starts off feeling personal but then the "Who we are" section seems to mix perspectives, beginning in the third person. I'm no copywriter though, nor am I an expert in English although I am a native speaker. My own website probably isn't perfect either!

grayclhn 12y ago

The text is pretty hard to take seriously, e.g.: "Market Qawba: Premium themes to make your things elegant" Surely there's a more specific word than "things"

Qawba 12y ago

Thank you all for your feedbacks and criticism, I will take everything into consideration. Thanks for the motivation.

lafar6502 12y ago

your website is awful

soulkarver 12y ago

"Your brand is your business identity.Through unique brand identity design we help you to distinguish your business from your competitors." --> You forgot the space after "identity." The site is very dark. You can hardly see the image in the background with all the black. Move the example products (like the 4.99 fakia landing page) closer to the top.

Qawba 12y ago
Thanks for the suggestion.

matrixnad 12y ago

You guys do a good job in presentation, however was not directly absorbed by how you would help me, or exactly what the your specialty is. Good design, not a clear enough picture on the company's mantra.