New web design for our own site. [Feedback]

armandorg · May 2023

Hey everyone!

After like 2... maybe 3 years i have finally had some time to refresh our own website, including some new works aswell we have done. I tried not to fill it with useless/marketing/content but rather go straight to the point.

I am looking for feedback, good and bad may those be! https://aalayer.com

What do you think?

TheDP · May 2023

Looks good to me.

Well done 👍

armandorg · May 2023

@TheDP said:
Looks good to me.

Well done 👍

Thank you mate!

Ympker · May 2023

Looking good, mate!

FrankZ · May 2023

Looks good. Easy to get around and find what I was looking for.
💯

armandorg · May 2023

Thank you both a lot! appreciated

tme · May 2023

Good job! Like the colour scheme a lot!

ViridWeb · May 2023

Simple, clean and Straight to the point..
Nice Job..

armandorg · May 2023

@tme said:
Good job! Like the colour scheme a lot!

@ViridWeb said:
Simple, clean and Straight to the point..
Nice Job..

That's what i intended! Thank you!

sh97 · May 2023

Looks very... Neat!
Good job!

MichaelCee · May 2023

Mobile user. Looking good!

armandorg · May 2023

@sh97 said:
Looks very... Neat!
Good job!

Thank you!

@MichaelCee said:
Mobile user. Looking good!

Thanks man!

dwight · May 2023

It's simple and mobile friendly, I think it's pretty good!

bone · May 2023

Looks good.

armandorg · May 2023

@dwight said:
It's simple and mobile friendly, I think it's pretty good!

@bone said:
Looks good.

nergar · May 2023

very slick I think. great work

armandorg · May 2023

@nergar said:
very slick I think. great work

Thank you!

webhostinguk · May 2023

I do like white background websites.. good work.

armandorg · May 2023

@webhostinguk said:
I do like white background websites.. good work.

Yes, for websites i also prefer light themes instead of dark themes. Though, i activated both.

CamoYoshi · May 2023

Loads fast, no unneeded animations, simple to navigate and super easy to skim through in a few seconds. A+ work!

red · May 2023

IMHO the only thing I don't like is the 3D effect on the images, too much wasted space around them and it doesn't look modern to me.
Everything else looks really nice. Good job!

cold · May 2023

looks good to me

armandorg · May 2023

@red said:
IMHO the only thing I don't like is the 3D effect on the images, too much wasted space around them and it doesn't look modern to me.
Everything else looks really nice. Good job!

I personally like them, especially when showing client's work. Though, thank you for your feedback!

@CamoYoshi said:
Loads fast, no unneeded animations, simple to navigate and super easy to skim through in a few seconds. A+ work!

Thank you man!

@cold said:
looks good to me

Thanks!

havoc · May 2023

Looks very clean. Basically fine as is. Couple minor points

Top nav bar is a little big relative to size of the menu text, so do one smaller or other bigger

I (personally) like seeing some sort of indicative pricing. Hard for web design I know, but "contact us" for every provider I'm comparing just to find out whether it's 20,000 or 200 is a waste of my time

And the angles in the pictures here create a disconcerting visual effect when scrolling fast.

rcy026 · May 2023

@red said:
IMHO the only thing I don't like is the 3D effect on the images, too much wasted space around them and it doesn't look modern to me.
Everything else looks really nice. Good job!

I agree with @red
The 3D effect looks "Windows Vista"-ish, and it clashes with the otherwise modern and fresh look and feel of the site.
Adding that 3D effect does nothing for visibility, it just looks weird and annoying, I think just a flat, 2D simple image would look a lot better.
Otherwise it's really good.

Hxxx · May 2023

Looks clean.
Which is positive.

armandorg · May 2023

Regarding the 3d effect i personally liked it, mostly liked it too so i think i am going to keep that for now...

Anyways, thanks for all the feedback!

ralf · May 2023

There's no information about your company, not even what country you're based in, which means potential customers can't conduct even superficial due diligence on you before spending potentially lots of money, nor do you seem to provide any way to contact you if something goes wrong. In the footer, you claim you've been in business since 2016, but there seems to be no evidence of this. There's no years on any of your blog posts, but they seem to only cover just over 2 years from a quick scan of the months.

To me, all this shouts "small, new company pretending to be bigger and older than they are". If I was looking for someone to design me a new website, this lack of transparency would put me off even if the design itself looks OK.

EDIT: just did a whois on your domain, and it was newly created in 2020. So, now I really don't trust anything on your website to be true if you claim this company was doing web-design business 4 years before it even had its own domain name registered.

armandorg · May 2023

@ralf said:
There's no information about your company, not even what country you're based in, which means potential customers can't conduct even superficial due diligence on you before spending potentially lots of money, nor do you seem to provide any way to contact you if something goes wrong. In the footer, you claim you've been in business since 2016, but there seems to be no evidence of this. There's no years on any of your blog posts, but they seem to only cover just over 2 years from a quick scan of the months.

To me, all this shouts "small, new company pretending to be bigger and older than they are". If I was looking for someone to design me a new website, this lack of transparency would put me off even if the design itself looks OK.

EDIT: just did a whois on your domain, and it was newly created in 2020. So, now I really don't trust anything on your website to be true if you claim this company was doing web-design business 4 years before it even had its own domain name registered.

Hello there,

Yes you are correct, there is no official business details anywhere in the website because locally i am running digital services business under a different brand name which includes 2 more brands i own, it's my preference not to include it yet in the website. Those informations are provided to the clients upon any purchase or request (+ official invoice for tax purpose if they want it.)

Everything is done legally, if you think providing some sort of business name and details in the websites gives 'transparency' you are completely wrong my friend. There are registered 'businesses' out there providing all that information and still scamming up to this day.

So.. a domain registered in 2020 and us(me) assuming we have been designing websites since 2016 is fake? Because domain is registered in 2020... right.
Read below:

I even have a page dedicated to how we started, if you'd take your valuable time to read it: https://aalayer.com/about-us.php It explains everything and why we quote 'since 2016'.

First of all, the quote 'Since 2016, we've been designing websites for hosting businesses worldwide!' is because me.. i have been around in the hosting industry and my first ever custom client was in 2016. Now technically it's still me designing websites from requests i get from the website... meaning since 2016 we have been designing websites for the hosting industry. And that explains how long of experience we have doing this type of service, not how long the domain is registered.

I would be happy to explain any other questions or 'transparency problems' you might have.

armandorg · May 2023

@ralf said:
nor do you seem to provide any way to contact you if something goes wrong. In the footer, you claim you've been in business since 2016, but there seems to be no evidence of this.

If something goes 'wrong'? What goes wrong?
Client needs to contact us incase they want a custom service, they will be in touch with us through there for any issues or problems or if they purchase a premade theme, there's a dedicated Dashboard with 24 / 7 support for their purchase through various methods.

Also we have a contact us page? In case something goes wrong?
https://aalayer.com/lets-talk.php

ralf · May 2023

It sounds like you only wanted feedback that was positive. I was just telling you the things about your site that would cause me to not want to buy any services from you. It's pointless arguing with me here that I got it wrong, because that doesn't help any potential customers who have the same concerns as me.

But, to address a couple of your points:

by your reasoning, do you think my own company that provides software development consulting would be justified to say "We have been designing websites since 1996" because that was when I personally first got money directly from customers for doing freelance web-development work? Most normal people would interpret claims of "we did x" on a company's page to mean "the company did x", unless it is made very clear from the text that you actually mean "people in this company have previously done x". And I've certainly seen many companies who are quite open about it and say things like "we have 35 years of experience between us" rather than trying to attribute people's previous work to their current company.
I still have no idea even what country you are from, so for instance I have no idea whether you work in timezone that will make co-operating on projects easy or not. Nor would I have any idea if there would be VAT implications if my company chose to use your services.
Many countries, including most EU countries, require the company ID and registered address to be visible on a corporate website. Personally, it's one of the first things I check if I'm planning to spend any non-trivial amount of money with a company.
Again, with the information available on the website, there's no way to tell if you have been running your company providing the claimed services since 2016 or whether you speculatively registered your domain 2 years ago and just started up your company last week. If I was going to spend a few thousand on web design, I'd assume the latter unless you convince me otherwise.

But anyway, this is my feedback, take it or leave it. I won't waste any more time trying to justify it to you.

New web design for our own site. [Feedback]

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