As some of you may know I was made redundant in July last year, and rather than seek further employment I decided to start something up myself using my redundancy money.
I aimed for a small gap in the market in my area for a low priced mobile computer engineer serving primarily domestic customers. and I created this website http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/ using some graphics 'borrowed' from my Vistaprint business card design.
The original point of the site was to hold domestic customers attention, and present all of the information required in a simple way. Many of my customers say that they chose me based on the fact that my website was very simple and to the point, other ones were overkill and didnt present the information clearly.
The website isnt very pretty, or even professional looking, other than the concept not a lot of time was put into it. However it has worked very well and I dont want to stop this. hence I havent bothered to re do it so far.
Over the last 9 Months my business has grown, I have many regular customers and often get reccomendations. I have got saturated with work to a point where I have been able to increased my prices twice now and have hired a part time employee.
Along the way I have picked up 5 Small local business's who now rely on me for all of their IT needs, the last one I have a full support contract with, the first 4 are just invoiced as per work carried out. I got these through contacts and recommendations from doing domestic work.
I want to redesign my website so that I keep my domestic work but I can start to tip the balance a bit more towards the commercial work, mostly because it makes more money for less hastle, and its the only way I can see my business growing further. I want to slowly change my business to the point where I have more than 50% commercial work including some more decent support contracts, only after then will I rebrand, go limited and VAT registered with a whole new name and brand more oriented at business customers.
This is the interim, where I hope to be able to entise business customers without scaring off the domestic ones all under the existing brand, so a website redesign is needed.
Here is the first draught http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/redesign/'>http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/redesign/ It has no content yet, this will be lifted from the existing site, extended and rewritten in once I am happy with the design. I also want the blog to be integrated into the site without over complicating things.
Does anyone have any comments about how the design fairs against my old one in terms of my requirements ?
I have the 2 sections (plus Blog) on the top tab menu, and 2 similar but different colour themes to seperate domestic and commercial targeted pages. Bear in mind I use landing pages with a clever script so people coming in from the search engines will hit the relevant page, so the colour theme shouldnt change unless a business customer strays to domestic pages or vice versa. But I want this to be obvious when they do it, hence it is highlighted by the colour change.
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Inertia
Sorry this involved a bit of a 'History of me' to set the scene.
If you want to skip the blurb then its old http://www.yourloclacomputerguy.co.uk/ vs new http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/redesign/'>http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/redesign/
As some of you may know I was made redundant in July last year, and rather than seek further employment I decided to start something up myself using my redundancy money.
I aimed for a small gap in the market in my area for a low priced mobile computer engineer serving primarily domestic customers. and I created this website http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/ using some graphics 'borrowed' from my Vistaprint business card design.
The original point of the site was to hold domestic customers attention, and present all of the information required in a simple way. Many of my customers say that they chose me based on the fact that my website was very simple and to the point, other ones were overkill and didnt present the information clearly.
The website isnt very pretty, or even professional looking, other than the concept not a lot of time was put into it. However it has worked very well and I dont want to stop this. hence I havent bothered to re do it so far.
Over the last 9 Months my business has grown, I have many regular customers and often get reccomendations. I have got saturated with work to a point where I have been able to increased my prices twice now and have hired a part time employee.
Along the way I have picked up 5 Small local business's who now rely on me for all of their IT needs, the last one I have a full support contract with, the first 4 are just invoiced as per work carried out. I got these through contacts and recommendations from doing domestic work.
I want to redesign my website so that I keep my domestic work but I can start to tip the balance a bit more towards the commercial work, mostly because it makes more money for less hastle, and its the only way I can see my business growing further. I want to slowly change my business to the point where I have more than 50% commercial work including some more decent support contracts, only after then will I rebrand, go limited and VAT registered with a whole new name and brand more oriented at business customers.
This is the interim, where I hope to be able to entise business customers without scaring off the domestic ones all under the existing brand, so a website redesign is needed.
Here is the first draught http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/redesign/'>http://www.yourlocalcomputerguy.co.uk/redesign/ It has no content yet, this will be lifted from the existing site, extended and rewritten in once I am happy with the design. I also want the blog to be integrated into the site without over complicating things.
Does anyone have any comments about how the design fairs against my old one in terms of my requirements ?
I have the 2 sections (plus Blog) on the top tab menu, and 2 similar but different colour themes to seperate domestic and commercial targeted pages. Bear in mind I use landing pages with a clever script so people coming in from the search engines will hit the relevant page, so the colour theme shouldnt change unless a business customer strays to domestic pages or vice versa. But I want this to be obvious when they do it, hence it is highlighted by the colour change.
Thanks in advance.
/edit fixed typo's
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