I have a co-worker who runs an Omaha private security company as a side business. The guy who owns the business is a great guy and a real pleasure to work with, so once I heard that he had paid a friend of his $350 for a website, I volunteered to take a look at it and give some of my opinions.
The business itself is actually quite successful. They have several contracts with local bars and music venues. They also have done security for several celebrities that have come into Omaha, which I thought was interesting.
Here were my suggestions for their site:
1) Is that a template from 1999? I'm sure I saw that template somewhere else. I suggested that they pay $500 for a customized logo/banner/Wordpress template package that actually looked good.
2) If they couldn't do that, throw up a blog on, say, updates.4horsemensecurity.com with a decent looking template. I'd do that for free. There's all sorts of fun stuff that they could talk about.
3) Smile a bit more in the pictures. They have 20 employees, some of them probably smile every now and then. Take pictures at venues with the employees smiling.
4) Get rid of the "Code of Conduct" and "Tactical Implementation" sections. Replace with spam-resistant "Contact us" page and a great "Testimonial" page.
5) The "about us" page needs the text to wrap around the pictures. And the writing needs to not suck.
6) General spelling/grammar/etc errors.
7) Home page re-write by a professional writer with a heavy call to action.
8) Acai banner.
9) Keyword research, article writing package, social bookmarking package, directory submission package, DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.
10) Provide banner code for fans of their company to post where they can (they have quite a few friends with myspace, etc)
Anyone ever help a friend out with their local business website? How'd they take it?
Any suggestions that I missed?
The business itself is actually quite successful. They have several contracts with local bars and music venues. They also have done security for several celebrities that have come into Omaha, which I thought was interesting.
Here were my suggestions for their site:
1) Is that a template from 1999? I'm sure I saw that template somewhere else. I suggested that they pay $500 for a customized logo/banner/Wordpress template package that actually looked good.
2) If they couldn't do that, throw up a blog on, say, updates.4horsemensecurity.com with a decent looking template. I'd do that for free. There's all sorts of fun stuff that they could talk about.
3) Smile a bit more in the pictures. They have 20 employees, some of them probably smile every now and then. Take pictures at venues with the employees smiling.
4) Get rid of the "Code of Conduct" and "Tactical Implementation" sections. Replace with spam-resistant "Contact us" page and a great "Testimonial" page.
5) The "about us" page needs the text to wrap around the pictures. And the writing needs to not suck.
6) General spelling/grammar/etc errors.
7) Home page re-write by a professional writer with a heavy call to action.
8) Acai banner.
9) Keyword research, article writing package, social bookmarking package, directory submission package, DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.
10) Provide banner code for fans of their company to post where they can (they have quite a few friends with myspace, etc)
Anyone ever help a friend out with their local business website? How'd they take it?
Any suggestions that I missed?
