Please critique web designer site

[Lorel]

Hi,

I am a web designer and have had my site online for about 4 years. It is getting good results from search engines ( about 1,000 a week and about 90% Google) and I'm doing well for my main keywords and I've doubled my visitors since Dec when I started updating my pages every week (fresh content). I validate my pages frequently and try to keep them compatible with the main browsers. However I'm not getting enough clients. I would appreciate it if you folks could tell me what might be wrong and how to attract more business--not necessarily traffic.

http://www.loriswebs.com

thanks,

[pyro]

Aesthetics. I'm not trying to be harsh, but frankly the site looks like something from the '90s, and in internet years, that's prehistoric.

You might want to have a look around some galleries like http://www.cssvault.com/ and http://www.cssbeauty.com/ for some design inspiration.

[96turnerri]

Originally posted by pyro
frankly the site looks like something from the '90s, and in internet years, that's prehistoric.

id say a bit more than that, with a little bit of effort your site could be something good, now as you are webdesigner your site is showing customers what they are getting now if thats crap why do you think you are not getting enough work, you could sit down for a day or two and restyle it and have a muc more aesthetically pleasing site and get lots more work which equals more $$

Rich

[LJK]

Lori -
A lot of your designs did seem outdated. I'm making the transition to .css with no tables at all - and I think you should too!

As you browse through CSS sites (esp. cssZenGarden), the newness of the designs might inspire you to change the way you're approaching your layouts.

Good luck,
El

[zingmatter]

To be honest, clip art-standard graphics ain't gonna cut the mustard these days. If you want to produce grpahics that people want I'd get going with Photoshop (or equivalent) asap.

As web designers you own site has to be absolutely breath-taking...potential clients should go 'WOW!' when they see it. Even the dreaded Flash animation.

Sod the CSS versus tables issue for now, just get it looking great first. Have a look at what other big web design firms do - that's the standard you have to acheive...

Good that you work on the content though - and you hit rate is excellent....

good luck

[Lorel]

I had plenty of work up until a few months ago and
I'm getting a bid request almost every day recently but no takers
so I don't think my design is that big of a deterent, and I have good
references from my clients, and my prices are right as long as
they aren't shopping overseas.

Thanks for the suggestions re the site being too 90's. I assumed as much.
I'm learning css but haven't completely tackled eliminating tables yet.
However I don't see why changing the css will attract business--because
my clients would not be checking out the code anyway. What I need is a new
design and that I will aim for and elminate the tables later as was suggested.

BTW, I neither use or recommend flash because the software to view them
is not available on all platforms and it slows down viewing for older
computers and irritates most surfers and none of the info can be read by
search engines. So it's nothing more than fancy glitter in my estimation.

And I don't use clip art--I design my own graphics in Photoshop or Fireworks.

Thanks for your suggestions,