It’s my great great pleasure to be among the 100 participants selected to write a review for exabytes brand new facelift! Firstly I would like to start with a disclaimer! These are just my personal comments and analysis to the site, exabytes or anyone may use it as a guideline in any of your site design – if it valuable to you, I don’t mind any humble credit to me and my little blog. However in any new design or strategy that you like to employ do test them often, what may work now does not mean it will work the next month (thanks to the advances of technology) and communicate with your clients often as possible as they should be the one that gives you the most valuable information! Any great design is useless if you are not solving your client’s problem!

Test platform

• Internet explorer - 6.0
• Firefox - 3.0.1
• Google Chrome - 0.2.149.29
• Screen resolutin - 1280 by 1024
• OS platform – Windows XP

*I do suggest to text all the browser in different OS platform e.g. Mac OS / Linux etc (depends on your common user’s profile – obtainable via web metrics)

Old layout

New layout

Comparing both design, the old and the new screen layout seems to be a pleasant transition with numerous screen usability improvements and navigational enhancement. Without further ado lets jump into my two-cent worth of ‘constructive-criticism’ and suggestions.

Tag line

Does exabytes have a tag line, like ‘ensuring your presence 24×7’, I know that it is a bit cheesy but you get the drift, a short tag line helps to summarize what your web site is all about!

Page alignment

The new page is formatted to sit right in the middle of the browser regardless the size of the screen. The old design is left align, it feels like as if it is not formatted correctly sticking to the left side of the page. My suggestion is to constantly observe the trending of your client’s screen resolution size, you will get such information from the metrics tracking tool you use. E.g. Google web analytics, Omniture (Site Catalyst) etc. Such information will help you in future to design pages that suits your general audience.

Color usage

From Exabytes’s logo, I am guessing that the corporate color is blue and orange. I notice the old site uses the blue quite constantly even the background, the orange color is also noticeable from the navigational button. I prefer the color scheme of the new site, the white background gives the feeling of clean white spaces, de-cluttering from the previous design although the new layout seems to have more items per page.
Orange color in the new site seems to be acting as a secondary color scheme and is not a prominent color / design elements in most of your banner design. Perhaps it is Exabytes’s choice but if the brand color is blue and orange, it should be use constantly in all media elements just like Digi’s yellow, CIMB’s different red tones and Maybank’s yellow and black. Color helps in subconsciously associating with a particular brand.

Visited links

It seems that the links in the main page does not change in color after I’ve visited them. However I believe the link color change allows user to understand their current location and knowing what page they have visited. It helps them in navigating around your site. I personally don’t want to visit the same page again and again, however I do want to get more information from the other pages – help me!

Top navigation drop down list

If you have a strong / dark colored banner, in my opinion, I think that the background of the drop down list should be a solid white and not the current white at opacity 80%. It may be a little difficult to see especially for the slightly matured audience.

Hot news scrolling text

Unfortunately I am not a big fan of scrolling text, it distracts me from reading the banner’s information where I SHOULD be reading. I would prefer if the center piece banner rotates with different promotions or hot news (smooth transition please) – its big in size and it gives me the information I need at a glance. This section should be your hottest real estate value of your site, use wisely.

More scrolling text – Accepted payment methods

Is there a need to scroll them? Or display payment method? Anyway, as mentioned before I am no big fan of scrolling stuff, its too distracting. The fade in fade out effect under Notable clients works better in contrast (smoother transition).

Stock image usage

Referencing to your current Student hosting banner. This may not be all that relevant and depends on your target audience. However if your target audience is mostly local user / Asian, I would suggest using a local face! It gives a better connection.

Call to action emphasis – subscribe newsletter

What is the purposes of user subscribing to your newsletter? Latest news? Latest promotion? I wont put my emails in it though … at least not knowing what I will get!

Text size

It is great that the new site allows user to change the font size, this is especially important for folks that are not-so-young. However the site design is not dynamic enough to encapsulate the font size changes. I tried to increase the fonts by just one size, the text starts to fall out of the designated box and the text field is jutting out of the screen (Google Chrome browser). In contrast with Firefox, the zoom feature seems to work better than the text zoom, although the pictures may look a little fuzzy. Lastly, text size changes doesn’t seem to work on IE 6 – hmph.

Background metatags

Perhaps the site is not completely ready yet but I notice that the new site does not have keywords and descriptions. No SEO on the site?

Search function

I did a quick search just for testing purposes. I typed in student hosting, yeap I got the right results and more. I’ve got results even from exabytes’s competitors! I wonder if exabytes want their clients to jump ship? Check out the result below.

Other misc suggestion -

Get a Favicon

As an example, check out the little icon beside the URL of my blog, you will see an M that denotes my site. To find out how to make a favicon check out http://www.ahpen-blog.co.cc/2008/09/11/113/

Last word

Regardless of the web design, old or new … so far the services provided by exabytes has been wonderful! How do I know? Well my site is hosted in exabytes of course! Check out the new site here - http://www.exabytes.com.my

Well that’s all the 2cent worth I have, it applies to any web design out there that anyone is doing. But then again, don’t take my word for it, test it and you will get the idea.