Random Homepage Review (#002) – Poynter Landscape and Construction

Continuing with our new weekly series, I review now the homepage of a "landscaping" company. Just to re-cap what this series is all about, I want to provide basic tips on design and usability. I think the best way to accomplish this is by looking at real-life web sites. So, what I do is think of a type of company — this week landscaping — search in Google, and pull up a random web site.

With that said, let’s jump right into it. The company I pulled up this week is Poynter Landscape and Construction. First — the review.

Review

Click the screenshot to enlarge it.

Recommendations

Overall, I was quite impressed with this homepage. It’s clean, easy to understand and visually pleasing. This is pretty much what I would expect from a landscaping company. However, there are a few areas in need of improvement, so let’s go over them.

• No automatic music or sounds. Ever. It’s extremely annoying and in this case just weird. I don’t want birds chirping at 90 decibels from my speakers. Get rid of it or give users the option to turn it on.
• While it’s not a huge problem, I would swap the position of the logo and tagline. Conventionally, the logo should appear in the upper left-hand corner since this is where users have been trained to look first. Not a big deal. The tagline is great.
• The navigation is a bit lackluster. It should be moved below the header and above the content. A nice dark blue background color with larger fonts would help make it stick out more.
• There are some issues with specific navigation items. For instance, why is "Landscape Architecture" broken out from "Services"? Which one should I click? And why "Landscape Architecture"? Go with something simple like "Landscaping". "Career" is missing an "s" and "Customer Comments" should probably just be re-named to "Customer Testimonials". "Galleries" can be more precisely defined as "Our Work" so that people know that they can find project examples under there.
• The opening description sentence is perfect and to the point. The title, however, could use an injection of creativity.
• The box on the right seems to be a catchall for everything else. It contains a random picture, the guarantee (which is good) and some text. I would recommend just putting featured works in that area. People want to see things when it comes to landscaping. Make sure they can see how much better you are than the competition.
• The logos that appear above the news and events are great, but they look out of place. Normally, you’d see this type of stuff in the footer.
• The news and events boxes are both odd. The news box doesn’t really contain any news. It looks like a bunch of odd keywords like "PLANET Trailblazers" and "Delivering Drainage". What do these mean? It doesn’t matter — I can’t even click them. Same goes for the events.
• The testimonial at the bottom should be identified as a testimonial. Otherwise, people will get caught up for a second trying to decide what it is (or they might just not read it).

That’s it for the second Random Homepage Review in the series. This is a weekly series, so stick around until next week! If you have a homepage that you want reviewed, contact me or leave a comment.