Hi Everybody,

I am working on building up a "school show" business for next fall. I am mailing out postcards which will lead people either to me or to this web site..

http://www.magicexperience.info

Any suggestions, or constructive criticism is welcome

Cliff

Cliff,

Personally, I wouldn't be comfortable sending somebody over to that site. It simply does not look professional. I'm not trying to be rude or mean, but it looks like a site that you paid nothing for, not to mention that it is on a free web server. Spend some money to get a real web page. You can even go through GoDaddy.com and spend a few dollars a month for a cheap hosting package.

Your website is a very important part of your marketing image, and I personally feel it is better to have NO website that a bad one. A few recommendations, though, if you decide to keep the site.

1) Change the font on the home page. You're using Comic Sans or something like that, and it really does not look like a font a business should be using.

2) Change the link colors. Blue on blue is hard to read.

3) On the photo page, watch your html code. The text for the picture captions has strange characters caused by trying to use apostrophes.

4) Lose the counter. People don't care how many other people have visited your site. It can only hurt you if the number is not large.

Just a few ideas.

Thank you Kevin... This is the kind of thing I am looking for.

Cliff,

No problem. If you have any more questions, please let me know!

Cliff,
You bought John Kaplan's Fundraising Magic didn't you?

Black background with white letters needs to go. As stated above you can get a website hosted for next to nothing. Directnic.com has bannerless hosting for $15.00 a yr. I use them all the time for some of my minor websites.

I agree with all of Kevin's comments. I'll add one more: Testimonials: Letters are hard to read. Better to retype with the contact info on the bottom (ask for permission) I noticed one mentioned your local IBM Ring. A big NO-NO!

Hope this helps!
John Cooper

Ok, lets try this again...

1. I do not know who John Kaplan is. I am basically flying by the seat of my pants.

2. I have made the changes that have been suggested above, except for the different host web site.

I have a couple of questions about that. I can get an adequate host for $33 a year. The only concern I have is that the bandwidth is limited to 25 gb per month. I have no clue if that is a lot of a little. Can anyone help me translate that into visitors per month?

Thanks

Bandwidth is kind of like how many lanes on your highway. The more bandwidth, the more traffic your website can handle.

Whenever someone visits your webpage, the hosting server transmits all the data (html file, images, audio, etc.) across the internet to the customer's web browser. The page you have right now is probably way under 1Megabyte (MB) in size (just a guess).

So every time a customer visits your website, that's 1MB out of your 25 Gigabyte limit per month.

Since 1 Gigabyte = 1000MB, that means you could 1000 visitors to your site every month and you would only use 1/25th of the 25 GB limit.

If you're including stuff like downloadable audio (e.g., an MP3 file testimonial) or maybe a party planning guide (PDF file), then you'd need to factor those into the mix as well. For instance, if your MP3 file is 10MBs, and it gets downloaded 10 times, that would be another 100MBs added to your monthly limit.

Bottom line, unless you're planning on providing a whole bunch of downloadable items, or vastly increasing the core page size of your basic site, a 25GB bandwidth limit is almost certainly way way more than you'll ever likely use.

--Jack

Cliff, you are marketing to schools. The lead sentence of the "What Do We Do" section has a glaring, screaming English error.

"The Magic Experience are located in the Los Angeles/ Orange County area of California." "Magic Experience" is singular, "are" is plural. Any teacher sees this and may stop reading right there.

I also think the headline, "The most fun way to fund raise in the world" might be grammatically incorrect. At the very least, it's worded awkwardly.

- Donald

P.S. I would also recommend going with a lighter colour background. Dark on dark is hard to read.