http://www.indiabeauty.com/

I designed a new website IndiaBeauty for a client and it is ready to launch .. I appreciate webdesign experts to go through the website and express your constrctive remarks on overall design (Layout, Colors, Graphics, Menu, Header, Footer, etc) .. Your remarks/suggestions really helps me to improve my webdesign skills..

Looks very nice, the only thing I that confused me at first was when I clicked on a link and it suddenly looked like I went to a completely different site. You might want to use the same flash menu that was used for all pages, at the homepage too. I like the lay-out and looks of the other pages better too. I might be a little biased though, because I know how flash works, but have no php/html skills at all.

It seems everything on the main page is an image. I would strongly recommend against that. First, search engines don't understand images, so your content will not be read by search engines. Second, you can't resize the text, and therefor the site isn't very accessible.

When you click a menu link, you get taken to a page with a completly different design. Why? Changing the design prevents users from becoming familiar with the site. If the main page is nothing more than a splash page, why have it? I think there needs to be more consistency with the design of the overall site.

Congratulations on a very pretty and eye pleasing site. However there are a few things that should be noted.

First: The home page contains an image thats sole purpose is to display text. This should not be used for accessibility reasons as mentioned by JFetting. But also that image that displays the text is 84KB, which is approximately 13 seconds download with a 56K dial up modem. In my opinion that is not acceptable when you could have the text as text with a background colour or image and it would probably only be about 2KB. You should always aim to have your home page as the fastest loading page in your site. After all you don't want to lose visitors before they even get in the door.

Secondly: When I scroll over the flash images on the make up page and other pages they go frosted white and a hand appears as if I can click on them. But I click and nothing happens, this makes me wonder if it is my browser that won't open a popup or whether there is a problem with the page etc... After being disappointed by the no click thing then the images stay frosted white and I can't see the images clearly any more. After several mouse movements back and forth over the pictures they eventually come back to their original display.

Thirdly: You need to think about some compression on that flash navigation bar it is 254KB and that is at least 30 seconds wait for a dial up internet connection. Even though I am no flash guru I am sure that you can bring the animation down to about 100KB with little effort.

Fourth: Where am I? Put yourself in this situation: I clicked on your makeup link read the whole page and looked at the pictures etc ... this took about a minute, I scrolled back to the top and thought to myself, which page am I on???? There are two things you could do to prevent this thought from occuring: 1. Have a heading on each page so I can clearly see that I am on the "make up" page or 2. Highlight the navigation element that I am currently in. So if I am in make up then make the make up button a different colour to the other navigation items. This would help me

Fifth: Lets look at your search engine optimisation. There are a few things that you could do to improve in this department.
- Improve the compression on your images/flash files
- Have a meaning full title on each page instead of just having India Beauty. Google uses page titles to help determine the relevancy of your page.
- Name your pages with names and not letters. Instead of having m.html for make up you should have make_up.html. This will add to your key word density for the page.
- Add text links to each page in the footer so that people who can not view flash files can still view your website and because search engines can't navigate through flash files.

The above is my opinion only and I hope that it helps you out. I was very picky in my critique in an attempt to help you fine tune the site NOT in an attempt to distract from the quality of the site. Good luck!

Eden Brenchley
Instyle IT - Web Design and Web Hosting