What Would You Like Changed/Added on the LL Website?

quickly done and a very nice job:D

Matt and Dave,

Nice job on the color change to the website.

A few things I noticed:

On the products page, on the top banner, I think you should add the address and phone number on the banner.

The specs for the Pocono BV, Hearth, and Hyfire are in black and don't show up as well on the dark gray background (At least on my screen) I do like all of the other type in white. Very easy to read.

At the bottom of the page. the bright blue on the "Domestic Hot Water Coil", "Installation Manual", and the link for domestic water coil installation are a little hard on the eyes on that background.

My mom said to stop or I'd need glasses. I'm wearing them and still have a hard time seeing at times.

And I'm not gonna stop until I need trifocals !!!!!



When I get time, I'll check the other pages



Rick

Thanks for the feedback Rick, will try and get those changes done tonight.

I like the intro on the main page which does a good job of selling coal stoves. The buttons on the left are small and the colors don't go together, imho. You might want to try several colors and have forum members vote on the best. It might be cool to have some testimonials and videos showing the stoves in operation. For not to0 much money you can get a model to walk on to the screen and introduce the brand.

Matt, the blue color in your "welcome to" greeting is hard on the eyes. color to background makes that shade of blue hard to look at or distorted. hope things are going well for yourself and Dave.

Much better Color scheme and layout compared to the old one. Nice work gentlemen.

I'd like to see a little button at the bottom of the home page that says "Everyone named Fred get's a free Pioneer". <evil grin>

My only real suggestion....on the home page in the upper right corner you have a white "business card". I think it should have more of a margin. The text touches touches the sides of the rectangle leavingvery little or no "negative space". In the sign world "negative space" is a good thing. Even if the white rectangle stayed the same size and the entire text and graphics were a bit smaller it would look better because of more negative space. Also I might center "stove company" under "Leisure Line". maybe not, but I'd try it & see which way looks better.

OK... back to that button.......

Freddy wrote:I'd like to see a little button at the bottom of the home page that says "Everyone named Fred get's a free Pioneer". <evil grin>



OK... back to that button.......

We can do that as long as you are willing to pay the shipping and handling charges ..

Flyer5 wrote:

Freddy wrote:I'd like to see a little button at the bottom of the home page that says "Everyone named Fred get's a free Pioneer". <evil grin>
OK... back to that button.......

We can do that as long as you are willing to pay the shipping and handling charges ..

I'll drive there to pick it up!
Chris F. (Fred)

DVC500 at last wrote:

Flyer5 wrote:

Freddy wrote:I'd like to see a little button at the bottom of the home page that says "Everyone named Fred get's a free Pioneer". <evil grin>
OK... back to that button.......

We can do that as long as you are willing to pay the shipping and handling charges ..

I'll drive there to pick it up!
Chris F. (Fred)

Good one but we would still have to handle it at some point .

Freddy has all the coal and now he wants to stock pile stoves?

Flyer5 wrote: Good one but we would still have to handle it at some point .

Not if the button said "Rick 386"

I would be there at 0'dark thirty waiting for you to show up with my own hand truck ready to walk from the loading dock into the assembly line and truck it right off the floor into the back of my pickup.


Sorry Freddy........tough times require tough actions




Rick

I've restrained from commenting on the LL website until I could compose a more general response. As many have pointed out there are many aspects of the LL website that beg for improvement. The many suggestions are helpful but the entire site needs to be revamped.

Web sites are a reflection of the company behind it. A clunky site reflects poorly on the company. It may have good products or service
but the new viewer and potential customer gets frustrated and just goes away. Creating a great web site is difficult. It takes a combination of graphic arts and technical excellence. It's best left to experts. Using the web as an information medium and/or advertising tool is in it's infancy. Printed media has been around for centuries. The "web" is a baby. What you can do with web pages and it's use to promote business is still evolving.

I've taken several college level web design classes, both credit and non-credit classes. Some taught by former print graphic artists, some taught by software types. What I conclude is there are two types of web page authors, the technical software expert and the print media graphics artist. Neither can create a great attention getting business web page alone. It takes a combination of the two. The technical expert knows how to do it but doesn't know the human visual factors. The graphics artist is just the opposite. I have some expensive web design software but by no means consider myself capable of creating a great web page. I have engineering technical skills not the necessary graphic artist skills. Rarely is the engineering brain and the artistic brain in the same head. Take a look at the following web page link:

http://behnkes.com/website/

It's for Behnke Nurseries Co., a old local famous nursery, garden center and landscaper. It's what I consider an excellent business web site.
The "home" page grabs your attention with lots of visuals and navigation around the site is institutive. The banner bar at the top adds just enough "gee wizz" drop downs to be interesting. Above all it presents a lot of information that keeps the viewer interested without endless page navigation. Technically it uses all the bells and whistles, custom fonts, java script, flash automation, etc. The "buy online" feature redirects a customer to a order service company. It may look like a "Behnke" site but it's really a provider of web ordering services. They also provide the payment processing via a secure server. Keeps you out of the potential credit card records being stolen problem.

So what to do? I would first determine what I want the LL web site to do? Describe products, compare product features, product sales, company history, download product manuals, repair part ordering, etc. Then I would surf web and find business sites that most closely meet the needs. Usually a web site lists the site author. Contact the author and get a price quote. Expect to pay thousands especially if it has dynamic content. Look at the web author's sample web site portfolio. Ask them if the have graphics artists and what web authoring software they use. Ask if they validate the web pages with the World Wide Web Consortium <http://www.w3.org/> Call their reference clients and ask them how happy they are with what was created for them.

Don't try to create a web site on your own. It's too much of a learning curve to do it right. Spend your time on designing and building excellent coal burning products. Don't host a web site on your own computers. Web hosting services are comparatively cheap and it's one less headache for you. Plan on providing lots of photos and product descriptions to the web author. While it might be tempting to create your own web site, don't. Instead look at it as a tool, an investment that's bringing in new customers and keeping the old ones happy.

Yanche: I think your post sums it up very well. I would just debate the fact that most artists today do have HTML programming because it's required to get hired at a progressive, successful company. They need to be able to code by hand too but some publishers are happy with adobe Dreamweaver skills. I ran a successful site and have the skills to program a site and can do very good graphics but in the end a real artists blows me away. When I had my site we used an incredible artist who could cookup graphics that were mind blowing. He was kept busy by many of the leading software publishers. He was always spot on with his color palletes, themes and created dazzling sites. Too bad he was a flake. Although, LL sells its stoves through its dealers the website is incredibly important to the final sale. I remember shopping for a coal stove. At the time I didn't know this site existed and my dealer didn't carry LL stoves so LL was not an option. Anyway, I went to all the websites of the mfg's. who sold coal stoves so I could do more research on my own. If I had found the LL website and it had detailed pics and videos showing me why their stoves have a superior design and how their automatic thermostat makes owning a coal stove an enjoyable, comfortable experience I may have been swayed to try to locate a dealer in driving distance. I remember calling Alaska and while they aren't rude they aren't that chatty either. Then one day I had a hopper fire and called Jerry. He spent a long time on the phone explaining how my stove worked and what to do. From that day on I bought any part I needed from LL and always recommended them.

Yanche wrote:The banner bar at the top adds just enough "gee wizz" drop downs to be interesting.

The problem with drop down menus is they either rely on CSS or Javascript to function. Neither is reliable, CSS presents cross browser compatibility issues and JS breaks if the user doesn't have it enabled which presents a lot of accessibility problems too. Simple example from this site is smiley insertion and BBcode insertion breaks if JS is not enabled.

Yanche wrote:custom fonts, java script, flash automation, etc

Keep in mind if the font is not installed on the users computer it will either degrade to the secondary font you can provide in the CSS or the browser default. My opinion about flash and JS is that it's great for many things like video with Flash but it should be used only where it's needed and not because you can. When you're considering using JS or flash you first have to ask yourself, can I do this with standard HTML? -or- Does this really add value to this page. If you can't justify it's use then it shouldn't be used.