Content Suggestions?

@fruitwerks

What is the goal of your homepage? It is not asking anything of your user. It is basically an abbreviated about us page. You should get your top 1 to 3 actions on the homepage.

What I mean is that you need a call to action. If the purpose of the site is to SELL Parrots, Sell Parrot Products and EDUCATE visitors about parrots then get to the point. You could have the following calls to action below a one sentence version of the intro:

• Buy A Companion Parrot!
• Learn about Our Breeds!


• Get products for your Parrot!

The idea is to give people clear choices not just leave them to looking at a menu and a nice pic of a parrot. There has to be a call to action.

Here are some sites of mine with calls to action--giving users clear choices:

http://www.preferredhomesales.ca/
http://www.remaxchester.com/

As you can see both of these sites have no content to speak of but ask specific questions to draw people into the funnel of the site. Misconcepetions of what should be on the homepage are everywhere but this is marketing and not coding so stop listening to coders (who don’t know a lick of marketing {i.e. the Mootools trolls}) and read some marketing sites like http://www.sethgodin.com/ http://www.searchengineguide.com/ http://www.bly.com/blog/ and more.

These people know how to get your message across and make your site work. Study your analytics and then make changes. I would read Seth Godin’s EBook "Knock Knock" (read about and download from here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/09/free_ebook_1_no.html).

Hope this helps.

As always, all the best,

Jay

Your site looks fine, a tad too simple but I agree with SmashingRed, you have to tell your customer
that you are there to help them fullfill his/her needs ( I am assuming you already know what are
the needs of the parrott buyer/breeder). YOu are there to help them succeed in what they do and
you want them to find what they need (products, info, parrotts, etc) fast and eay, without needing to
guess, search or go somewhere else.

About Mootools, just leave them and never go back there... try YUI by yahoo, ExtJS, jQuery, Mochikit, Dojo, etc.
there are a lot of javascript/ajax frameworks out ther ethat are friendy and helpful... you don’t need those
jerks in your daily life...

smashingred - Yeah I am going in that direction actually, it came to me last night after watching a South Park episode ( http://www.tv.com/south-park/quest-for-ratings/episode/372426/summary.html?tag=ep_list;title;125 )
I need to write a few pages and figure out where to put them

charliez - I would love to use a framework that is supported in a nice manner, but mootools is the best all around for what I need. Other than adding ’choices’, what do you suggest to make my site not so simple? Once I get settled in more with the content, I plan on adding some more visual effects...

Thanks!

OK... here is a mock-up of some of the ideas I had. It would require maintaining more content, but that is fine with me. Ignore the use of the same thumbnail image and the mis-matched fonts, lack of apparent links...

Suggestions?

Great super niche product, just need to spruce up the design a little using colors, graphics and fonts...

Just for inspiration:

Yeah the fonts! Personally I have many many fonts installed... but an out-of-the-box Mac or PC does not. I made a few changes to the fonts, but that was before this thread started. I really don’t know what everyone has...

I do intend on adding drop shadows, gradients and such, just not there yet... I didn’t buy photoshop just to have it I spent almost two hours trying to get the box on the left of the slideshow to work in IE and FF... then I stumbled upon my answer on a totally unrelated search; display: inline;

Once I get a new menu settled in I am going to ramp up the eye candy.

Thanks!

@fruitwerks

Your Changes
I have looked at the changes and there is some improvement.

I wouldn’t go crazy with fonts. In fact I would stick with a small set of fonts no more than 4. There is a good compatibility table here: http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html and you can also use the Bitstream open source fonts which are available for most ’nix environments.

Links Hard to Find
One usability issue is that you have obfuscated your links and you are not consistent with links. Most users will be able to use your navigation bar fine because people know that is likely navigation but your inline links have various styles and fonts that are not consistent from section to section. You can have different links in various subsections on a page but for the most easy to find should be first: underlined and second a different colour than your body text. It is okay to add behaviour to the hover via css by changing the color, underline or bacground but make sure it is vastly different than your body text. The best links are the default blue but as long as a user can determine what a link is immediately you will be okay.

Don’t Center Web Text
I would also recommend not centering text on a webpage. It is painful at best to read and looks less professional than it ought to.

Your Content
I would change the opening paragraph to the following (or similar) plus I would also lose the Welcome to Sweet Skies Aviary (you have a logo and a site title and I take care of it in the first part below):

Sweet Skies Aviary is a family run, small-scale breeder of healthy and wonderful companion parrots in Dallas, Texas. We’re Bob and Amy (don’t know your names) and for 7 years we’ve been breeding to share the joy of owning a parrot with you!

Why This Is Better
There is a whole host of reasons to make these changes but here are two:

First: you get all the SEO benefit of having important keywords Dallas, Texas, Parrot, Breeder and Companion all in two sentences.

Second: since you and your wife are the people you should name yourselves to build trust and allow people to know that, yes they are dealing with real people. In addition if you have more to say you can create an about us page and put it all there and not in an intro.

Hope this helps some,

Jay